HowTority.com

To register a new domain you can shop around by checking on Google for different ISP (internet service provider) and compare prices and services. For the sake of this article I will suggest to you two providers that I have personally used in the past and which I found valuable although for different reasons.

1)      Inmotion

2)      Go Daddy

Both are offering the possibility to register your domain following an intuitive process and both are also offering hosting plans for your newly created domain. If you are registering your domain for business purposes, I advise to register not just a .com or a .co.uk but the same domain name with few different dot extensions. In the future, when your domain will be world famous, you won’t regret that someone else had registered your domain name with a different extension and now you have to buy it off for few thousand’s….

When buying the hosting package, keep in mind also how many e-mail address you will need and chose accordingly from the different options given. I understand that if you have never registered a domain before, this will look to you as a very little or shallow information, but, I can assure you that there isn’t much more to know and that the process is as easy as buying anything else on the internet.

Hopefully by now you will have:

• clear in your mind
• why you want to start a blog
• what your blog will be about
• the name for your blog
• a domain or more registered
• an hosting package with one or more e-mail accounts according to your preference

You are not in a bad place, but there is more to do.

Now you will have to start to work on the technical development of your blog. This step doesn’t require you to be an expert web developer or a programmer, but will be an advantage if you are just an average internet user with some basic computer literacy.

The decision that you are going to make is quite important as you are about to choose which CMS (content management system) you are going to use to develop your blog.

Although there are many CMS around, I suggest choosing between the 3 major open source ones. The reason why I suggest the open source ones is that they are continuously developed and updated by large communities of contributors who are constantly sharing on the for a their experiences and suggestions. Do not underestimate the value of the wealth of knowledge that you will pick up by reading the posts on the forum as this will be the biggest asset that you will be accumulating investing your time in it.

The 3 CMS that I suggest are:

1)      Drupal

2)      Joomla

3)      Wordpress

Drupal and Joomla are at first sight more complex but despite make you feel a bit daunted at the beginning, later they will offer you the widest chance of realising professional websites  with complex functionality. Wordpress is very easy and perfectly functional to build a blog but, in my opinion, it doesn’t offer enough scope to build a complex a modern website with it.

Once you have chosen the right CMS you can install it in your root directory utilising the service of software download offered form your service provider. If you need assistance bear in mind that you will be able to find plenty from the ISP and , as said before, from the forum.