How to Buy a Domain Name | Build Your Own Website | WordPress Org Setup

If you have been wondering how to build your own website for a business, you have come to the right place. I will guide you through How to Buy a Domain Name and then get you quickly up to speed with how to install WordPress Org Setup on it. Then we will make sure everything is up and running and functional, at the end of this tutorial. Sounds good?

Trust me it’s like a walk in the park, a Disney themed one, with unicorns and fairies. So easy that you would think why did I go to college for this?

Top Things You Need to Build Your Own Website

If there is a potential thriving business right in front of your eyes, and you are wondering how to get started, let me break the ice for you. You need a website. A website so that people know where you at, and how to get to hold of you or your business and products. And you want that on a world wide battlefront. Don’t you?

To build your own website you need to come up with a name first. This is the most important part actually. Try to keep it short and go for nouns because that’s what is good for SEO.

Even though it wouldn’t matter when your posts get easily found based on your keywords, but it matters when people are trying to find you on a Search Engine, and they couldn’t because you used too many prepositions that Search Engines skip.

Right after that make sure you take a peek into your bank account, because you might have to loosen your pockets for this. To build your own website you should be ready to spend some money for one of its primal steps: Buying a domain.

A Free Alternative

There’s a much easier way and a process that doesn’t cost you a thing, to build a website. It is also hosted by WordPress. A Com version. They let you create one for free, however unfortunately it is hosted on ‘their’ domain. Free things come at a price, don’t they?

Their domain means that you have to add “.wordpress.com” every time you login into your website meaning your website name would look like:

www.websitename.wordpress.com

Well there is absolutely nothing wrong with it, and it can be still good for your business if you don’t need to do much changes there. But the services WordPress provides becomes really limited. You can’t monetize it with ads, you can’t personalize it as per your wish, you can’t add a lot of plugins and are forced to make do with whatever has been given to you. You can’t do a lot of stuff, that you can if you had a domain of your own. So, it is advisable to go for the other alternative. The better one that WordPress has which is also popular as WordPress Org.

In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to build your own website from scratch. And to learn how to build your own website, you must know there are two major parts that you need to understand:

1. Web Hosting Services
2. Domain Services

Now there is one more crucial pre-requisite that deals with WordPress Installation that you need to understand too while trying to build your own website. WordPress Org Setup is one of those final steps that hands your website everything you are looking for. We will get to that eventually in this post.

First, to build your own website pay attention to these minutiae:

Purchase a Web Hosting Service

Before you get started with the process to build your own website, remember that you need to have:

• Web Hosting: It is one of those steps that you need to perform so as to make the World Wide Web understand that there is a kid in the block who needs to launch a website. So you need a Web Hosting Service Provider like Dreamhost, Bluehost, HostGator, GoDaddy, BigRock etc. to first purchase a Web Hosting plan.

Here, I have got a coupon that you can use to get 50$ off on hosting on DreamHost.

https://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?2219895/promo/dreamsavings50

Here’s another one that can land you a 25$ off on hosting:

https://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?2219895/promo/dreamsavings25

• Domain Name: Think about a cool name for your website. When you are done, how can you be sure that no one in the world thought about it before? Whatever the name you choose there’s always a possibility that somebody might have already used it before. To ensure that yours is one of a kind, you can search your domain name for availability.

There are plenty of websites that let you do that. You can simply google search “domain name availability” and click on any links that show up, to check for the status of the cool name of your website

Or you can use this website: Instant Domain Search

You can alternatively use the one that a Web Hosting and Domain Service provider houses by default.

Steps on How to Buy a Domain Name

My preference stays Bluehost since I believe their service to be topnotch. You can simply visit their website and click on the Domain tab to open up the following page:

Step 1: Now whatever name you have in mind, you can simply jot it down there and search for the availability of relevant domain extensions. I prefer “.com” mostly since people tend to search that extension more than others. You can use up to 15 domain name ideas and then click on the Search button to check for availability.

Here, I am searching for my own name. Let’s see if we have the word ‘Scottshak’ available for domain name creation.

Whoopee! I am there.

Step 2: Alright the next step is obviously purchasing it before somebody else gets any funny ideas. So, I am gonna go ahead and Select the available domain. The moment you click on Select, it will begin to show in your Shopping Cart.

Click on Checkout to proceed for the payment.

Step 3: Make the payment just like you have been paying for a shopping product. I know you are a spendthrift! I hope you wouldn’t have a problem making payments.

Once the payment is done it automatically redirects you to the control panel page.

You can Manage your Orders from here, in case you plan on buying multiple domains.

How to Add Name Servers

Step 1: Go ahead and check if your website is getting displayed successfully on the List of Orders section.

To do that, click on Manage Orders, then on List/Search Orders.

Step 2: You should be able to see your website there. Go ahead and click on it.

You should get a screen that looks something like this:

Step 3: Now our prime area of concern is the Name Servers section. Click on it. It is this that we have to change.

Remove all four of these Name Servers, do not update it just yet.

Step 4: Now if you have purchased a Web Hosting in the past, as suggested in the earlier section of this site, you must have been provided with name servers. Go ahead and check for that mail in a separate tab.

If you are looking at that mail, look for something that looks like this:

Step 5: Copy the name servers provided to you in the form of link one by one and paste it inside the manage name servers dialog box against respective name servers:

Step 6: Now click on Update Name Servers.

Adding your Website as an Addon Domain

The next part is one of those crucial steps to build your own website.

The following steps deal with adding this newly created domain to your sub-domain list. If you have purchased a Web Hosting Service then you must have been provided with a cpanel login Id.

Step 1: Login into your Cpanel account. Navigate to the part that says Domains.

If this isn’t your first domain with that hosting, click on Addon domains.

An Addon Domains Page should open asking you to enter the name of the domain. My domain name is “scottshak.com” so I am gonna go ahead and type that in the box.

Step 2: You will notice that the moment you enter the domain name and click anywhere the rest of the things automatically populate.

If you want to create an FTP account for your website, you can do so by checking the box and entering username and password. Once done, click on the Add Domain button.

That’s it, your website has been successfully created. However, the job isn’t done yet. You need to install WordPress on it so that your website begins to look like the ones that you see on the internet everyday.

How to Install WordPress Org Setup

This is yet another easy part to build your own website, and to carve it the way you want.

Step 1: Just go back to the Cpanel Home Page, and look for the WordPress symbol under the Scripts section.

Step 2: Click on WordPress.

It will take you to Softaculous Apps WordPress Installer page where an Install Now button must be beaming at you. Just click on it.

Step 3: When you click on Install Now it will take you to Overview tab, where you are supposed to select the protocol of your website, domain and directory.

Step 4: You can either choose simply “http://” or go for the popular “www” version. The choice is yours. Select the domain name. As suggested you can remove wp from the “In Directory textbox” since it is relative to your domain. It will save everything in wp folder giving the reins of its administration in your hands.

NOTE: There is this admin Username and Password option too which I highly recommend you change as per your preference. You are going to need it quite often.

Step 5: When you start the installation, it will finish in a jiffy.

That’s it. Installing WordPress was the final step. So, now your website should be up and running.

When You Do The Final Check

If you immediately go and check the status of your website, I must let you know it wouldn’t be what you expected.

Step 1: Go ahead and try to open your website in a browser. What do you get? Something like this?

Well hold your horses there! Don’t worry, it takes some time for the website to actually start showing. Maximum half an hour so.

Step 2: Go have some snacks that are kept in your kitchen and you forgot all about.

Step 3: When you come back after half an hour you will see that the website has actually been created over a default template that WordPress offers. This is how the website might look like:

This is the presentable version of how people are going to find your website in reality. But how do you make changes to it? Well slow down there tiger! WordPress also creates an admin page that you could use to make changes to your website.

The WordPress Admin Page

Step 4: All you have to use is the “wp-admin” version to login to your website. Login using the Username and Password you had created by visiting the your website’s admin login page. So type your website name followed by /wp-admin and search.

i.e. websitename/wp-admin

Here it is: “www.scottshak.com/wp-admin”

Step 5: Enter your details and click on Log In. It will take you to the admin page. You will be able to create posts, pages, menus, categories, tags and what not from here. To check the changes made just open your website in a different tab, and refresh whenever you make a major change on your website.

On a scale of 1 to crazy, how happy are you? Now that you have learnt how to build your website from scratch?

Alright, I am going to let all that sieve in. Till that adios!