Creating a website for your business can be confusing. You’ve heard about different companies that register domain names and providing hosting, but aren’t sure what services you even need. This article will be a step by step guide for getting your business website online.
The first step in getting your website online, is deciding what the requirements of your website are. Is it going to act as an online business card with contact information, or will it be a complete online store? Different requirements of course, will each have different solutions.
Purchase Domain Name
If you are making a simple business website, your first step is to register your domain name. For domain names, I like to use namecheap.com. The dashboard makes it easy to configure domain settings, and their prices are great.
Choosing a Domain Name
In a perfect world your business name will have a “dot com” address available.
Configure Name Servers
After we have purchased our domain name, we will configure the name servers to direct traffic from the URL to our hosting. Technically, we need to have our hosting account to complete this step.
Selecting a Hosting Server
There are a lot of big name web host out there that I would avoid. In fact, most of the web hosting giants have been buying up the best small business hosting companies for years, making it difficult to find a high quality host. When a big name host buys a small hosting company the first thing they do is stack up the number of sites on a single server to cut operating cost as much as possible. This leads to slower loading speeds for your site.
Also be careful who recommends your web hosting to you. Many people will recommend a web host because of the affiliate commission they are making off of you.
So what web hosting do I recommend? My favorite hosting server currently, is A2 Hosting. The site speed is good, prices are great, they offer WordPress optimized hosting, and are located in Ann Arbor, Michigan!
Domain name, hosting, whats next?
Now that we have our domain and hosting, we connect our domain name to our hosting name servers.
This is done by logging into your domain name account dashboard, and entering your name servers, provided by your hosting company, into the name server section of your domain name dashboard. This takes a few minutes to be changed over.
Installing WordPress
For building your website, I recommend using WordPress. To install WordPress, log into your hosting account and go into the “cPanel” screen. From there, you should find a shortcut to install WordPress. Choose your selected domain name and install WordPress.
Building Your Site
After you have installed WordPress, it’s time to start building your website. Check back soon for intormation on building a site in WordPress. Until next time, thanks for reading!
Chris Phillips
Evolve Marketing