Friday, August 22, 2014

Building a Website

Someone on LinkedIn was asking about building a low cost website where they could sell there books. This was the advice I gave:

You can register your own domain through Wordpress and Blogger - registering a domain is NOT purchasing it. You have to renew your registration or you lose your name. If you forget to reregister, you lose your name because there are giant domain purchasers who will scoop it up - then you have to buy it back from them, which is not cheap. Registering a domain is the only way to get a unique website name that is portable.

However, if you register a name through a free website builder (such as WordPress, Blogger, or one of the ones listed at the bottom of this post), it may or may not be portable depending on the host. (Some free hosts will actually register the name for you - in their name, so this is why many people want to do it separate from their website setup. However, not all of them are like this - read the fine print.) Many hosts will keep registering your name for you each year if you have given them a credit card to bill. GoDaddy (not recommended if you may eventually want to use a web developer), eNom.com, and Register.com are registries if you want to do it separately. (They should work with ICANN if they are legit. On average it costs $20ish per year, but some may have multi-year plans.)

I use Moonfruit: www.writetodreamreality.moonfruit.com because it is relatively easy to set up a shop with Paypal on Moonfruit and many websites want to charge you to do this. Obviously, since I my domain is umbrellaed under their name, I pay $0 and only have the small link in the upper right hand corner and the "Build your website through Moonfruit" at the bottom as far as ads go. The downside is that the instruction manual on how to set it up is long - and you want to download it for reference. Also, you have to update your website at least once every six months or you will lose it. Again, these were not problems for me. However, with CreateSpace, I would probably not need to sell on my website, because I could just link to my CreateSpace shop (which I do anyway on my landing page). If you just need a website that allows you to link to CreateSpace, you really wouldn't need something like Moonfruit.

Some people have trouble with Wordpress - to make a really nice website, you need to know HTML. I don't know what kind of shop you can set up on Blogger - my blogger websites are just blogs, but my website links to them and they link to my website.

Other notable and low-cost or free website builder/ hosts that allow you to have an onsite shopping area are: www.homestead.com (Paypal), http://jigsy.com/ (links to ebay), http://www.jimdo.com/, http://www.squarespace.com/ (if you are in the US), http://www.tripod.lycos.com/ (PayPal), http://www.webs.com/ (links to etsy), http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ (PayPal), http://yola.com, and http://www.zoho.com/sites/

No comments:

Post a Comment