I’m not a geek. I’m not a tech savy. I just wanted to have my own personal site.
Come on, it’s kinda cool to have a place where you can write about things your passionate about, or things you want to share with our people.
So, once I decided, first step was: how should I set up my site?
Here what I’ve done. First thing, I knew I wanted my site based on WordPress. I was using a lot this awesome platform with other blogs and it’s really user-friendly. I’ve never used other platforms, like Blogger, but I know that a lot of sites I admire and I read a lot are based on WP , so the choice was made.
I looked for a web-hosting service. There are a lot of informations on the web , a lot of reviews and stuff. To be honest, if you don’t know anything it could be quite annoying because you don’t know if the website you are reading is completely trusted or it’s paid by the same hosting services. So, I took three examples , three blogs I admire a lot about SEO, owned by three amazing guys: John Doherty, Justin Briggs and Ross Hudgens. I went over a service like Whois.net to see where they were hosting their site. The three of them are hosted on three different services.
After having seen the prices and read some reviews around, I decided for BlueHost. I have to say that all the hosting services have similar prices, and similar options, but the think I liked the most about BlueHost is that I tried to chat with them, and they answered immediately, very kindly. The chat service is really important for me, since I cannot phone them (they are in the US, I am based in Europe). The thing I don’t like is that they don’t use (or at least not like other companies) Twitter as customer care service, and it’s a pity. But I hope they’ll catch up.
I purchased the domain and the unlimited space with them for 2 years, in which I can host all the domains I want, and this operations was done in 10 minutes, with a credit card. After that , I had access to the control panel, which is a panel where you can control everything about your domain and your space. Here there is a nice, fast and simple-to-use script to install wordpress for my site. And there you go, wordpress was installed successfully in few seconds.
From now on , I was able to manage all my site through the wordpress interface, which I already knew it.
Next step was to find a nice theme for my site. Looking at the code of Justin Briggs’ site , I discovered a fantastic site, full of amazing wordpress theme: ThemeForest. Here you have hundreds of cool themes you can purchase for different prices. I bought one (damn, it was a really hard decision), and then I uploaded it through “Install Themes” under Appearance.
I played around in the CSS editor in order to make some changes on the style of my blog, and because I like a lot coding a bit. Then, I installed some plugins. First of all, Yoast SEO plugin , Akismet , Yoast Google Analytics , SEER Contact Exporter , Broken Link Checker and Sharebar . If you want to know more about these and other cool plugin, you can have a look at this list made by Joost De Valk, THE wordpress guy.
Then I started to write something. I have to improve a lot because I’m not that kind of guy who LOVES writing, but I know it’s important to improve my english and share things in an easy way.
CAN I GET A HELL YEAH?
So here is how I set up my site, in few hours. I know there are more to do, and I’m going to, little by little, by hook or by crook (no wait, this is a Radiohead song..damn!). As you can see it’s really simple, even if you are not a geek and you can do it spending a little amount of money, completely on your own. I remembered when my father set up his first site in the mid-90s, how complicated things were at that time.
So, do your site. At least for having a personal space in a web to be proud of. And if you have questions about that, please ask me, I will be more than happy to give some advices.