By Mike Ippersiel
Getting online
Okay, so you found a company that would sell you a domain name for a good price (I hope you didn’t spend more than $15 or so/year) – now what? I promised you cheap webhosting and an easy to manage website, and now I plan to deliver – read on my friend.
Bare Bones Hosting
You can find free webhosting out there, but most of the time you’ll end up with cheesey ads on your pages. Often new webhosting companies will start out free with no ads and then bring them out later- not cool.
Here’s my solution: create a blog site with a free program called WordPress. What’s a blog site you ask? In my opinion it offers the best features of content management, posts, pages and allows your readers to leave comments.
If you’ve created a Myspace page and customized it, you should have no problems working with WordPress. Not only is it simple to use, there is plenty of documentation to explain the many features offered.
Getting Started
- Sign up for an account at WordPress.com
- Start up a new blog – use the name of your domain (ie www.yourbandname.com)
- Choose a template that works for you
The result will be a blog hosted on the WordPress.com site, so the address will look like: www.yourbandname.wordpress.com. To change this to yourbandname.com you need to ‘point’ your domain name to your WordPress site. You need to do this via the company that you purchased your domain name from. The company I use calls this feature “URL forwarding”, and also offers the ability to cloak the URL. This means that anyone typing in my domain will not only be redirected to the wordpress.com site, but it will still look like my domain.com and not a wordpress.com subdomain.
When you’re done you’ll have something like the page I made for my band: www.omegaAD.ca
So now you have a web site and all it cost you was the price of a domain name. You get 50mb free with wordpress.com – and that should be enough. Next time I’ll explain why. Also check out my free new 10 part video series called Band Website Secrets for more details.
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