Wendy Cholbi

Technology-to-English Translator

The two steps you need to take before you can start building a website

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Stepping stonesI talk about WordPress a lot, here and elsewhere online.

And sometimes I forget that not everyone is a WordPress wonk like me. That plugins and widgets are not, shall we say, everyday ordinary topics of conversation.

Especially if you don’t have a website at all, and you’re thinking you need one, and you’re not sure where to start.

Sound familiar?

This post is for you.

Step by step

See, there are two steps you need to take before you can even start to build a website. They’re technical steps, but they are well within the reach of anybody reading this blog post (whether you’re reading it on my website, in your email, or in your RSS reader).

Before you can build a website, you need a domain name, and you need web hosting.

If you don’t know exactly what those terms mean, or you (mostly, or sort-of) know what they mean but don’t know how to make decisions about them or how much they cost, I’ve got a gift for you.

Pamela Wilson (of BigBrandSystem.com fame) and I put together this nine-part no-cost series called Setting Up Your Website the Easy and Smart Way. Click to sign up here and you’ll get the first lesson right away!

Click to get the free course

Here’s what you’ll learn in the course:

  • What to look for in a web host, including a short checklist that will tell you if your budget web host is worth the money
  • The #1 web hosting mistake: don’t fall for this trap!
  • The elements of a successful domain name and how to pick a winner
  • Where to sign up for your domain name: we share our favorite resource
  • The industry-standard website creation tools used by some of the most powerful sites on the web today: they’re accessible to you, too, and we’ll show you where to find them
  • The two simple design decisions that will make your website look polished and professional

You’ll receive two exclusive special reports with in-depth information on setting up your website the easy way.

And you’ll get access to our no-cost on-demand class called Love Your Website. It’s a fast-paced, graphic-rich presentation that will walk you through how to get your site up and running, step-by-step.

I can’t wait to share these new resources with you. There’s no cost to you at all, so sign up now and you’ll get the first lesson today.

Click to get the free course

Free Motivational Posters

Here’s another cool gift for you — and a reason I’m thrilled to be working with someone with advanced ninja-level design skills!

To inspire and encourage you to start your step-by-step journey to an effective website, Pamela created this series of mini posters. Click here to download them. Find the one you like the best, print it out and put it on display where it will motivate you to take the steps needed to LOVE your website.

Love Your Website Manifesto
Stepping stones image by Nigel Davies on Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License

How to spend your measly technology budget

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First things first: If you have less than $500 to spend, go look at my list of tools that will let you build your online empire for free (and don’t forget to read the awesome suggestions in the comments).

Now, if you’ve got the $500 and want to know what to do with it, or you just want to know why I think you need $500 to really do a self-hosted website, read on. It’s time to look at some paid services to help you run your online business.

What to do with your first $100

OK, I said this in a previous post, but it’s really worth saying again:

Your first purchase should be a domain name.

This will cost approximately $10 per year. So if you have $20, you can either buy one domain for two years, or two for one year.

My recommendation: Your first $50 should be spent on one domain name. For up to 5 years. If you really want to (or if there are variations on the name, common misspellings, hyphenated versions, and the like), then use the next few increments of $10 to buy multiple domain names. Up to $100.

Just go to GoDaddy (although their checkout process is obnoxious, they’re cheap and reliable. Just don’t buy any add-ons or extras. You only want to spend $10 on your domain name, remember?).

If you’ve got more than $100, you can start planning for the next paid step (keep reading).

But for heaven’s sake, don’t wait until you have $50 or $100 so you can implement a complicated domain hierarchy. Just spend your first $10 on the first domain name as soon as you’ve got it.

No, your domain name doesn’t have to be perfect. You may well change it later (when you’re rolling in cash and can buy all the domains you want, that is). But start with something now. Your name. Your company’s name. Your goldfish’s name. Just register something already!

Now you can plug that domain into your free Blogger.com blog, which will instantly raise your professionalism score by twenty points. And carry on with your free online empire (or, I guess it’s now a $10 online empire).

The bare minimum: No safety net

So let’s say you’ve got more than $100. You’re ready to move beyond Blogger. You see someone like me, crazy enough to offer WordPress installation for $99. You think “Great! I can buy this and still have $1 left over!”

Not so fast.

First, do not spend your family’s grocery money on your website. Please.

Second, that $99 pricetag is not your total cost. Before I can install WordPress for you, you’re going to need the aforementioned domain name, plus a little thing called web hosting (that’s essentially renting space on a backed-up, secure server so that your site is accessible to the whole world).

And that’s the bare minimum. Figuring $10 for your domain name and $120 ($10/month) for web hosting, that brings us to $130.

A digression about the cost of hosting: You may have heard that it’s possible to get free hosting. There really isn’t any such thing, except for Blogger.com (which I discussed in my post about how Blogger is a perfectly valid place to build a website). So-called free hosts put ads on your site, ads over which you have no control. Don’t fall for that.

It’s much safer to simply buy web hosting, which you can get for less than $10 per month (often much less, but I use the $10 figure to calculate conservatively).

So, the thing about that $130 bare minimum? It’s pretty bare. You can spend $130 and have a working website, but you will have to totally and completely do-it-yourself. If you can, by all means go for it, but if you need any kind of help, you may find yourself panicking (or spending money you don’t have, or other inadvisable practices).

An annual technology budget for cheapskates bootstrappers

So that’s why I give the $500 figure. Yes, it’s a nice round number, hefty enough that you can feel really good about having saved it up, a number that you can speak aloud confidently (try it: “My technology budget this year is $500.” You may not believe it yet, but what if it were true?).

But mostly, it gives you a nice cushion beyond the bare minimum.

If you’ve spent $130 on your domain and hosting, you have enough of that $500 left over to do one or two of the following:

  • Buy premium services like AWeber (for mailing list management) or AudioAcrobat (for recording and publishing audio clips and files), each of which is about $20/month.
  • Upgrade your shopping cart capabilities by using a paid shopping cart service (my favorite, and the one I use, is E-Junkie, which starts at $5/month, but there are many others).
  • Buy a premium theme for your blog (any premium theme worth its salt should come with some amount of tech support, by the way).
  • Start a pay-per-click campaign with Google AdWords.
  • Hire a graphics wizard to design your logo and header.
  • Purchase a guidebook or do-it-yourself WordPress class that you can use as a reference as you build your own site.
  • Have someone like me install and configure WordPress for you since that’s a one-time task that you may not want to waste time learning.
  • Hire a tech-savvy VA for a few hours, or a business or marketing coach for one or two intense sessions.

And even $500 isn’t enough to do all of these things. You’ll still need to pick and choose carefully. You might notice that I didn’t mention web design at all, which is because truly custom design will cost at least $1000, and often much much more. You can do a lot with a highly customizable theme and a unique logo, though.

The bottom line is to think carefully about your support needs. And when you’ve figured out exactly how much support and training you’ll need? Double it.

And if I’m wrong, and you survive just fine on the bare miminum? Fabulous! Good for you! At the end of the year you’ll have $370 to spend on whatever your heart desires, and wouldn’t that make a nice holiday gift for yourself and your business?

How to forward one domain to another using GoDaddy

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I recently received this question via email:

“I bought two domain names, and I want both of them to point to the same place (I want to use one of them, and have anyone who visits the second one automatically go to the first one). How do I do this?”

Turns out, I needed to do this anyway for a handful of domain names I bought for the new WordPress class I’m teaching with my friend, energy healer and Project Nanny extraordinaire Meredith Curtin. So while I was busy forwarding domains, I snapped a couple of screenshots to illustrate how easy it is to change this setting from inside your GoDaddy account.

This trick is also useful if you’ve bought both the .com and .net versions of your domain name, or if your nonprofit uses a .org address but you also want people who type the .com address to end up at the right place. I always recommend buying more than one domain.

Forwarding a domain with GoDaddy is a simple 3-step process. Ready? Here we go:

1. Log into your GoDaddy account.

You’ll see a screen that includes a list of your domain names (or the first five, if you own more than five).

"My Account" screen, shown when you first log into GoDaddy.com

"My Account" screen, shown when you first log into GoDaddy.com

 

2. Click on “Advanced Details” for the domain you want to forward.

You’ll see a screen that’s chock-full of settings to change. Don’t be intimidated by this. All you need to do is make one small change!

Look for the arrow-shaped icon that’s labeled “Forward.” Give it a click.

Look for the "forwarding" icon on the Domain Manager screen

Look for the "forwarding" icon on the Domain Manager screen

 

3. In the popup window, fill in the web address of the site where you want your visitors to end up.

In the example shown here, I’m making sure that anyone who types www.thegentleartofmakingmoney.com gets automatically sent to the real class address, which is www.gentleartofmakingmoney.com.

Now, if I refer to the class verbally as “The Gentle Art of Making Money” and someone types the whole name, including the “the,” they’ll get to our main class page, because both addresses now point to the same place (try clicking the links in the above paragraph; they really do end up at the same place, with a barely noticeable time lag for the first one).

Click OK to save the changes (you can always edit or remove your forwarding later).

There you go! You have successfully forwarded your domain name to a different address.

Semi-Interesting Note: You can type any web address here. It can be a domain name that you also own (as shown in this example), but you don’t have to own it. The address you type can be someone else’s website, or even a page at Amazon.com. GoDaddy really doesn’t care where you’re sending people.

Just type the name of the domain where you want your site visitors to end up, and click "OK."

Just type the name of the domain where you want your site visitors to end up, and click "OK."

 

4. Bonus Tip: How to forward multiple domain names at once

If you have bought several domain names that you want to forward, you can also batch-forward them to avoid repeating these steps individually for each domain name. To do this, you want to go to your Domain Manager where you can see a list of all your domains:

Batch-forward multiple domains by checking multiple boxes before clicking the green "Forward" arrow.

Batch-forward multiple domains by clicking multiple checkboxes before clicking the green "Forward" arrow.

 

You’ll want to click the checkboxes next to all the domains you want to forward (you must be forwarding them all to the same destination address).

Then, and only then, click the familiar green “Forward” arrow at the top of the screen. You’ll see a popup window similar to the one shown in Step 3, except that it will indicate that you’re forwarding more than one domain. There’s still only one place to fill the destination, however.

Got any domain-forwarding questions? Leave me a comment and let’s talk!

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How to point your GoDaddy-registered domain to your DreamHost account

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So you’ve got a shiny new domain name registered at GoDaddy (or maybe you’ve had it languishing there for awhile… I won’t tell, I promise!).

Now you want me to install WordPress at your shiny new DreamHost account.

How do you get GoDaddy to play nice with DreamHost?

There’s just one little-bitty change you need to make inside your GoDaddy account. Ready? Here are the steps:

1. Login to GoDaddy.

If you click the “My Account” tab on the right edge of the green navigation bar, you’ll see a screen that looks like this one:

GoDaddy "my account" screen

The first tab on this screen, beneath your name and customer number, is “Products.” If you have domains registered at GoDaddy, you’ll see a line labeled “Domains.” If you have purchased any other products from GoDaddy, such as email, security certificates, or online storage, you’ll see those listed here as well.

2. Click the green Launch button to the right of Domains.

This click takes you to the Domain Manager, which lists all the domains you’ve registered through GoDaddy:

GoDaddy domain manager

You can bulk-edit multiple domain names by checking their checkboxes, but we’ll assume you’re starting with one domain name.

3. Click the domain you want to use for your WordPress blog.

Now, you’ll see the “Domain Manager” screen with all kinds of details and links.

The only thing you want to pay attention to right now is the link called “Nameservers.”

There’s a link, with an icon that resembles a shiny oil drum, near the top of the page. There’s (probably) another link at the bottom of the page called “manage.” Either of these will take you to the same place.

Domain Details screen, shown when you click on "manage details" for an individual domain in your GoDaddy account

4. In the popup window, fill in the DreamHost nameservers.

(Of course, these instructions will work equally well for a non-DreamHost hosting account, but we’re going to stick with the simple here.)

You must click the button that says “I host my domains with another provider.”

Then you must fill in the following blanks (and yes, it is perfectly OK to leave Nameserver 4 blank):

Nameserver 1: NS1.DREAMHOST.COM
Nameserver 2: NS2.DREAMHOST.COM
Nameserver 3: NS3.DREAMHOST.COM

These nameservers are not case-sensitive. I’m using all-caps just for clarity.

Finally, click OK.

Pop-up window where you fill in the DreamHost nameservers

At this point, the popup window will disappear.

You’ll probably see a status message from GoDaddy that says you need to wait a few minutes while the changes are implemented. This is totally normal.

You can feel free to log out of GoDaddy at this point, because technically, you’re done. Or, you can stick around and refresh the page after 10 minutes or so to make sure the Nameservers section of the Domain Details screen (figure 2) updates and correctly shows the DreamHost nameserver information.

You did it! Go you!

And now, when I install WordPress for you, it will show up correctly (instead of the page that says “this domain is parked at GoDaddy” which is not exactly the perfect advertisement for your business, is it?).

Any questions? Leave a comment here, or contact me.

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