How To Start Your Own Website

Before you start thinking about the design of your website, there is so much more that you need to consider. What will be the name of your site? Who will register and host your site? What technology should you use to create your web pages? There are great resources out there for all of these. You can search for ideas on the web; one of our favorite websites at this stage was https://websitesetup.org/.

There is a lot that goes into choosing the right domain name. Is it available? Can you envision your site with this name five years from now? Reading How to Choose a Domain Name helped us a lot. In fact, we chose (and registered) one name and after reading the above we decided to go with a different (and hopefully better) name.

After you figure out your domain name, you need someone to register and host your website for you. There are reviews and comparisons of registrars and hosts that you can find by yourself. Our site is registered and hosted by NameCheap.com. We’ve been with them for a couple of years now and so far we are very happy. They have really good prices and a surprisingly great customer service which you can chat with pretty much anytime. We even got help late on Christmas Eve (U.S. West coast time)! We use their basic hosting with Easy Word Press and so far have no complaints.

The next thing you need to consider is what tools you’re going to use to create your website. There are many site builders and blogging frameworks but if you are new to all this, definitely consider Word Press. We really like and recommend Easy WP, a slightly simplified version of Word Press called Gutenberg. The good thing about it is that you don’t have to set up Word Press yourself, your host already has everything ready and you get your basic looking site right after your site gets hosted. With Easy WP, you can get a decent looking site very quickly and it still provides a lot of flexibility which will allow you to tweak the details to your liking.

Even though we’ve discussed choosing the name, registrar, host, and site-building technology as separate decisions, you really need to decide all of them together. It’s usually easier (and sometimes cheaper) to register and host your website with the same provider. And you have to choose a provider that supports the site-building technologies that you want to use.

By the way, we don’t get any benefits from any of the sites or links we recommend. These are just things that we’ve figured out on our own and we hope that one day, they will help somebody.