Geeky blog alert! Part of my plan is to blog about the detail of setting up the basics for a business – this blog walks through how I set up this blog site on GoDaddy.
When I choose system to use, sometimes I’ll be doing some research about which the best system is, and sometimes I’ll simply be using my past experience to choose something that I know is good.
I’ve previously used GoDaddy and SiteGround for hosting websites. I’ve done a quick check to see how these are currently performing, and they are both still pretty good (report from Tooltester.com).
https://www.tooltester.com/en/blog/reliable-fastest-web-host/
There’s a great article here that compares 15 leading hosting companies. There are 3 things that I’m looking for:
- Speed
I’m setting up a Digital Marketing company, and one of the main criteria for good SEO is to have a fast site. - All-in-one service
I’m creating this company to be easy to run. I don’t want my domains (www.colinthorpe.co.uk, etc) in one place, blog and website somewhere else, email somewhere else still. So whatever hosting company that I use has too offer the complete package. - Cost
Cost will always be the last consideration when buying things for my business, but it always will be a consideration. Spending money to save time will be key to my strategy – especially starting as a one-person, part time business. But I’m foreseeing quite a few monthly software subscriptions happening and so I need to keep on top of these.
Based on this and a couple of other sites I’ve looked at, I’m pretty happy that GoDaddy will do me ok. Their WordPress hosting is good (another decision that I’m not going to sweat over is to build my site using WordPress). They are one of the main domain registration companies, have their own email service or link through to Microsoft 365, and have all sorts of additional hosting facilities if I need them in the future.
I was about to buy a domain name and then add hosting. Writing this blog has already made me money, though, as I came across an all-in-one package when I was reading round the site.
£5.99 a month gives me everything I need to get going with:
- Personal WordPress blog site
- Secure Certificate
- Free Domain Name
- Plenty of storage for what I need
- 2 free mail boxes for 12 months
- Backup.
Note that, after a year, the price goes up on all of their plans. It says in the panel, but it’s pretty hidden!
I ended up with a cart looking like this. I went to checkout, selected “Pay by PayPal”, got told VAT needed to be added (always annoying), and recorded my spend in my spreadsheet so that I can claim the expense later.
I could just use a free WordPress site for blogging, which I’ve done before. This will give a domain name along the lines of JohnSmith.wordpress.com. This is ok for personal stuff, but I’d like ColinThorpe.co.uk which I why I need something more. WordPress would charge £3 per month for this, and I would need to add email on top of this from £3.25, so no saving.
Once the payment was processed, I got a page saying ‘How do you want to start?’. This is quite promising – it looks like I’ll be able to use a wizard to get my blog site up and running.
I opted for “I’ve worked with WordPress before, but I’m not very experienced”, which isn’t totally true, but I want to see what the wizard is like without getting a whole heap of basic training, which I’m guessing is what this option will give me.
The next page is a wizard-type page. I just want this site to be a blog site, so I’m keeping it simple and just selecting that option.
I tell WordPress I want my hosting in Europe.
I don’t know what the GoDaddy templates are like, but I’m only wanting a basic site, so I’m going to assume that they will be good enough for that and again, save myself hassle.
The next page is a load of template sites.
The Preview button is great – it gives you a preview of what your site will look like ‘out of the box’, and you can switch between PC, tablet and mobile views (noting that 60% of Google searches are done on Mobiles)
I’m going to stick with the first template. None of them, sadly, look like Blog sites, but the first one is quite simple so I’ll go with this and see if I can customise it.
Apparently, that’s it. I’m getting a WordPress site!
At this point, I’m starting to wonder if I should have just used WordPress, as I know that does good Blog sites…. In a couple of minutes, I’ll find out!
And here it is!
A standard WordPress site – very point-and-click, and even with a handy list of tasks to do in the bottom right-hand corner.
I’m not going to do a complete WordPress guide from here. My challenge is to try to get this site up by the end of today – 2 hours remaining!!
Well, there you go. 1 hour 40 minutes later and I have a blog site set up. It took a bit of fiddling around with to be fair, and if I didn’t know the basics of WordPress I’d probably still be here this time tomorrow picking my way through YouTube videos on how to do what I needed.
However, my basic blogging site is now up and running, with a Secure Certificate and a “Contact Me” form all thrown in.
The Social links don’t work yet (as I haven’t got any socials yet!), and I’m not going to win any design awards, but it certainly does the job.
