Building my daughter a blog (part 2) – The Basics

After deciding on which website building tool to use in “Building my daughter a blog (part 1)” I now needed to consider some basics to do the setup for her

Domain name

Your domain name will be your public website address by which the public will access your WordPress instance. For example my the domain name I chose for this website is “thedanieltruth.com”. You want to try and reserve/register a domain name that will be representative of the content you’re going to create or it may be the brand that you want to use for your content.

Most hosting services will provide you with the option to choose and register a domain name as part of their services. if your hosting provider does not there are dedicated domain name registration services that you can use, but you’ll need some additional info from them once you’ve registered the domain name to specify on your hosted site to be used as it’s domain name.

You might not always find the exact name you originally planned to use available on the web, considering there are millions of websites each having unique domain names. If you find this to be the case think creatively to come up with a unique name that is maybe similar to what you wanted originally or a combination of some other words etc. etc. for example if amazon.com is already taken maybe choose amazonian.com as your domain name

Hosting provider

Unless you have a spare web server on standby with a network interface and line that can handle the traffic, you’ll need some space on a server that is online 24/7 for people to access it from all over the world

There are various different options that your typical hosting provider could make available to you for hosting which include shared or dedicated hosting and possibly managed hosting

Shared hosting is normally your cheapest option as a host would be shared between multiple websites where space and memory usage are limited per site. This is a viable option for a basic website that would not handle too much traffic, but drawbacks would be that your website performance could be influenced by the other sites on the host

Dedicated hosting can be much more expensive since your website will be assigned a dedicated host where all the resources are made available to your website only the prices can vary greatly depending on the resources being made available. This is a great option if you’re planning on running a business where you want to ensure your users the best performance and user experience on your website but due to the price tag might not be viable for something like a simple blog

Managed hosting are not provided by all providers, but where it is available it makes a pre setup environment with for example WordPress already installed and ready for use,. This option would also typically include some scheduled backups of your website and could also make a staging site (for testing changes and updates before going live) available depending on the provider.

Installing WordPress

Depending on the type of hosting and the provider which you’ve selected to host your website there can be various different levels of complexity to installing the WordPress software

Download, upload and install WordPress – If the hosting provider simply makes a web folder available to you, you’ll need to first download the WordPress software from https://wordpress.org/download/. Once the software has been downloaded to your local machine, you’ll need to lookup the ftp details provided by your hosting provider to upload the package to the server, depending on the hosting provider they may also make a web portal available through which you can upload files. Now that the software package is available on the server you can run the WordPress installation

Install WordPress – Your hosting provider could potentially make a portal/user console available to you which you can use to manage your own website for example with cpanel which can then be used to seamlessly install WordPress with the click of a few buttons if you choose to use it together with various other apps and modules that you may want to use to manage, enhance and maintain your website

WordPress already available – Lastly you can also find managed WordPress hosting options where WordPress would already be available to you for use out of the box once you log into your account the first time and you only need to configure and customize it to your liking

That covers on high level all the basics required to be in place for you to go ahead and setup your website. In the next post I plan to provide some practical examples of the items I’ve discussed, so don’t miss it if you want to follow along and create your own website