**Video coming soon!**
Until then, the instructions are below.
Transcription:
Hello, everyone and welcome to The Weekend Website! My name is Kim Bultsma and I’ll be your educator for how to build your website.
In this video, we’ll dive into
- What a domain is
- How to purchase one (and where)
- How to add us to your account
Let’s get started!
I like to use an analogy for websites to help you get a better understanding of how they work. Think of your website like a house. You make updates to your house–even paint it and rearrange it. We will be building your house during this course. People purchase houses–many people hire a designer to build their website for them.
Your domain (or URL) is your address. That’s how people get to your house. You have to renew that address each year, but it’s at a minimal cost–usually around $15.
Your house sits on land, which we’ll call hosting. You pay taxes on your house, just like you pay for your hosting every year. As part of this program, you’ll get premium hosting for $149/year, which includes SSL (makes your website https and secure), daily backups of your website, updating the theme and plugins for you, making sure it’s running as fast as it can, availability worldwide, and so on. Our premium hosting is kind of like paying someone to mow your lawn and provide optimum lawn care every two weeks.
Budget hosting, like what GoDaddy offers for example, is typically very inexpensive because you’re expected to do all the work, like do your own backups and fix it if it breaks. You’re also sharing your server space with millions of other websites whose owners don’t know how to fully optimize their websites to run faster, so it affects you. It’s kind of like living in a crappy neighborhood where your house is the nicest on the street. It’s also like you doing all the work and maintenance for your property all year long.
Your mailbox is your email address. While some use the mailbox that sits in their yard (like Gmail, for example), some people pay for fancier mailboxes, just like you can opt to pay for an email address at your domain, like me@domain.com. You can get Google Workspace email that uses your domain (like me@domain.com) for as little as $6/user/month.
Now that we’ve covered all the ins and outs of websites, let’s get back to that domain. If you haven’t purchased a domain yet, that’s ok! I recommend Namecheap.com. I like how they play nicely with pointing the domain to servers and how they also include privacy (so that your personal name, address, phone, etc. isn’t available to everyone on the web).
I highly recommend purchasing a .com or .co domain (which are called TLDs). For this website, I was creative and used the TLD .website, but it worked with the name of this course so I went for it. 🙂 You could use .store or .shop–it just depends on your business name.
Simply type your business name into the search and include .com and see where it takes you. You may have to get creative, but remember that you need to be consistent, which means you might have to name your social media accounts the same way. You could try something like “hello” or “my” at the beginning of your business. For example, if your business is called “Delectable Cookies” and delectablecookies.com is already taken, you could do “mydelectablecookies.com” for your domain. I recommend using a website like namechk.com to search and see if your naming scheme is already taken.
Once you’ve purchased your domain, click on >Account and then >Domain List to access your list of domains. Click on “Manage” next to your domain name and choose “Sharing & Transfer”. Under the “Share Access” area, type in info@contentalamode.com in the “New Manager” box and click >Add. On the next screen, the pulldown next to “Manager’s Access” should be “Give Manager Full Access”. Then, click “Confirm”.
I’ll also include step by step instructions in the document below this video. I’ve also included instructions for GoDaddy if you’ve already used their services to purchase your domain. If you can’t find instructions on your domain provider, contact us at create@theweekend.website and we’ll help you out!
That’s all for this section! Thanks for watching.