The
first step to creating your, or your company's, digital identity is to
build a website. Most people begin by purchasing web hosting services
either from a web hosting company or from a value added reseller and
have them build their own website. While this may be fine, a
do-it-yourself approach will get you going at the minimum possible cost.
This post will tell you how you can do this.
1. Purchase a domain name, from a domain registrar like TierraNet or any other similar company. This will cost you around US$ 14 / year. You can get an absolutely free domain name from Freenom
but these domains will end with .tk, .ml, .ga, .cf, .gq and not with
the usual .com, .net, .org etc. Irrespective of where you purchase your
domain from make sure that you have complete access to configure or
modify the DNS records corresponding to your domain, preferably through
a GUI interface.
2. For hosting your website you have two options (a) Get a traditional web server from a hosting company like x10hosting,
that could be free or have a monthly charge. Make sure that you have
access to the CPanel application to manage your website. (b) The other
option is to use Google's blogger
platform. Unless you want to build a transactional website with
PhP-MySQL ( or equivalent ) support, the blogger platform is far easier
to work with and is an excellent starting point. The blogger option is
strongly recommended.
This post assumes that you have chosen the blogger option.
3. Create a blog by following instructions given in this tutorial.
For the name of the blog, choose the same character string as you have
for the domain. If your domain is xyz.com then your blog should be
xyz.blogspot.com. This is not essential but is a nice to have feature.
4. A blog looks different from a traditional website because unlike the
latter it does not have a fixed home page nor does it have a set of
navigational tabs across the top. To get over this problem, follow
instructions given in this post. (alternate archived)
5. Now you need to link your domain xyx.com to your blog
xyz.blogspot.com. For this you need to login into your domain registrar
account (created in step 1) and then navigate to the screen that allows
you to manage the DNS. There will be DNS records that would need to be
added, modified. To do so, you need to go to this Google Support Site
and follow instructions there. Remember, you are modifying the top
level domain, that is www.xyz.com and not a subdomain like foo.xyz.com
and choose the appropriate instructions. [New] The
Google Support Site is good for top level domain like www.xyz.com.
However if you already have a site like www.xyz.com and you wish to
create a subdomain like icecream.xyz.com, then you should follow the
simpler instructions at smallbusiness.chron.com.
The DNS records that you add may have a conflict with existing DNS
records that the registrar would have provided by default ( that points
visitors to a default, under construction website). If in doubt, keep a
screenshot of the earlier records and delete all of them. The new
records should do the work. Anything to do with DNS servers takes some
time to take effect. So after completing this step, go away to do
something else for three or four hours ( though Google claims that it
will take 24 hours) and then see if you can load your website at
www.xyz.com. If everything is OK, you should see your blog.
Friday, September 18, 2020
Build Your Own Website
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