So We (she) decided to start a blog. But since we eventually want to start a business, and hopefully link the two she figured The First Step would be to come up with a clever website/company name and claim it immediately. She marched her fingers straight to GoDaddy.com and registered that bad boy. And with a nod, tap and a hot $12.17 MeAndYouMakeDo.com was born... or rather, registered... We had no idea there was more to it than that. Little did she know that basically all she did was the equivalent to registering a business name. All that $12.17 does is "reserve" that domain name for you for a year, or however long you want to pay just to own that name.com. Again, going by just the commercials, they make everything seem to straight forward. You "buy" a domain at godaddy and that's it. Boom... you have a website. So the Next step was to search "i bought a domain on godaddy. Now what" (yes, she really typed this). And guess what! That's EXACTLY what came up! She's going to be honest with you, she only skimmed the page. She is way too impatient to read all the technical businessy stuff when she's tired. She only read the bolded black title that said "Create a website". Ok! Got it! Website! and off she went to find a way to do this thing as free or cheap as possible. Queue "free website builder" google search. RESULTS: WEEBLY.com Along comes Weebly. It was fairly easy actually! Drag and drop stuff that you can almost put anywhere you want. Change the font colors, background colors or add a photo, etc. She spent two evenings typing it all up, making it look the way she wanted and adding the first blog post and then: it was time... But first! I'll let Kevin Spacey set the mood: (that means read that in his voice!) "It's 11pm on a Tuesday. You've been up for 18 hours, The house is quiet and you're exhausted but you're there! You're FINALLY THERE! Weebly was your cow..." And so... She hit the "Publish" button! a popup appears asking her what she wants her domain name to be... "Ok, No biggie" She thinks. She shakes it off and clicks the "I already have a domain I want to use" button and enters the address thinking "Ok, now here comes THE BIG CLICK!" And then another pop up saying it can't be transferred, but she can pay to transfer it over, blah blah blah, money money money... Detour: Proceed to the route. Ok, so GoDaddy must have something that does the same, right? we're already paying for the domain, let's see what they have. It was pretty straightforward... She even chatted with someone who walked her through signing up step-by-step. GoDaddy offers something called Managed WordPress Basic, it includes the domain name (if you don't have one already), up to 25,000 monthly visitors and a fancy email with your business name at the end to boot! All for the easy payment of $3.99/mo (of course that's if you sign up for a year or more) or $7.99/mo. Not free, but Not a bad deal, she figured. She tried to log in on the app for iphone to edit the site when she had time during the day with no luck. Kept saying her login information was wrong. And though the larger screens on the iphone 6s are amazing, it's not the iphone 6 Plus, or Ipad mini, or even a regular ipad... It's just not the same as having a keyboard and mouse. So logging in on safari wasn't giving her the view or capabilities she wanted either. She starts to work on the website as soon as she gets home, trying to recreate the amazingness she created on Weebly with wordpress. First roadblock: The Fonts: Listen, not everyone cares about fonts. She gets it. But she does! We work with boring 12pt Arial Unicode day in and day out at work. Can we get some character up in the blog please?! She tried searching for how to put the code into wordpress but short of installing some app and then putting it into the "coding" it's not very brain-fart friendly. Second roadblock: boring layouts that look worse on iphones: Browsing the layouts they looked nice. Classy, fun, exciting. When she applied them to use them for this blog? eh... And forget about how they looked on an iphone! It didn't take long for her to realize she wasn't happy, ANd she didn't like it. She wanted the weebly site! It was perfect! What did she do? Can she get out of This?! Is it too late? Lucky for us, there was still time! SHe called and cancelled GoDaddy and Wordpress in about 1 minute (turns out this can be done with the click of a button in your Account Settings as well) and she was back to weebly! NOw, we still have the domain registered at GoDaddy. Frankly because we paid for the year, and currently we're not missing the $12. for whatever reason today she was actually able to find an article about how to make weebly and godaddy work together (which she will look into later) (Update, you have to wait like 60 days after registering a domain name to transfer it anywhere, so… We'll update after that). For whatever reason that site did not pop up in her search before the purchased the WordPress with Godaddy, but nevertheless, it's there now. But she figured in the meantime, let's just get this bad boy up and running already! We'll take the free weebly site for now. One of the free "How to Blog" books she downloaded on Kindle said "before you go pay for a .com to blog, use a free one first and see if you even like it. Wise words Mr. Lotich! So she went for it. She hit that "Publish" button like her name was Desmond Hume (PLEASE say you understood that lost reference!), she typed in that website address with .weebly at the end proudly and boom. The blog was launched! So, the question remains... GoDaddy or No Daddy? In all the free Blogging books I downloaded for kindle there are several domain name places you can go to reserve your name. I haven't looked into them because I've already paid for the year, like I said. But I'm sure there is a spectrum of places you can go to that will include different things with their registrations, etc. Or you can pull a "make do" and go free and see how it goes! Ultimately it will be a matter of personal preference whether you choose Godaddy or a different site. I prefer Weebly this far. However most, if not all of the bloggers who wrote these free books suggest WordPress. Stating there's More you can do with it. I beg to differ, but you know... who am I? I have one, almost two whole posts ever! - Me and Him p.s. If you'd like more information on the free kindle books I downloaded please send us a message and I'm more than happy to provide a list!
2 Comments
Alicia
12/13/2017 10:01:18 am
Maybe I’ll give it another whirl! Thanks ProsperNoah!
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