Social Wisdom: Digital Strategy Musings

I love blogs and their ability to web enable individuals or small budding businesses.  I thought I’d share a simple formula for setting up your own domained website from scratch!  Here is what I’ve done:

• Register a domain with godaddy.com (or other provider)
• Host a blog on wordpress (or on your own web server)
• Get a paypal account
• Have Google Apps handle your mail – and get personalized email, calendar, shared documents, etc)

Get a domain name.   Consider the .com and .ca (or country specific extension).    I use godaddy.com – and my links will be for godaddy.    

Start up a wordpress blog and being testing content.  Go to privacy under settings and turn off the search engines until you are ready to share your final product.  It can take a bit of time before search engines find you so don’t expect immediate traffic.  Write about six blog posts to make sure you are ready to blog.

You will be mapping your new domain name to your wordpress account.    Here is the best article on wordpress domain mapping  - you will need to change your nameservers and use the url numbered addresses.  See article.

Unfortunately wordpress only takes paypal as a payment mechanism.  So you will also need a paypal account.  Do not hook up your paypal account to your home bank account.  Instead, create a phantom account with about $50 bucks in it (I use INGdirect and can create all sorts of accounts)  Don’t allow paypal to get to the mothership.  That goes for credit cards too.    I transferred bank funds to my paypal account and that took an excrutiating 8 business days to happen.  But this is a safe method.

For personalized email – sign up at google apps. (search it in google).  Get a standard, free membership and follow these excellent   Step-by-step instructions for Google Apps.

Once you have paypal set up, go to wordpress, upgrades, domains and add your domain.  It will cost 10 credits (USD).  With that done  – you can reassign the primary domain – and on the right, you will see ‘enable google mx’.  Click here and it will say “enter verification text” .   Remember the Google apps domain verification?  The “upload an html file” step?  Take that google text that is supposed to be in the html file and enter it.  And your domain should work!  Enter it in the address bar.

 Let me know if you have suggestions or changes.  Thanks