Step #2 of Building A Blog in 2024: A Website

Now that you’ve established the niche/vertical of your blog, it’s time to get started on “standing it up”.

Remember Field of Dreams?

“If you build it, they will come.”

Building a website is obviously essential. Without it, you’ll never be able to drive your audience anywhere.

You need a place on the internet where users can go to buy your products, a place to see ads, or a landing page to collect emails.

It doesn’t matter what kind of business you have…you need a website of some kind in 2024.

Luckily for you, you grow up in age where that’s relatively easy to do. There are builders like SquareSpace, Shopify, and Wix that will all give you a website.

Those cost a lot per month and are more for stores and landing pages. To build a full website (with relative user-friendliness) I would recommend Wordpress. That’s what I always use for blogs.

It allows a fair amount of customization, but if you’re tech deficient, you can just install a theme and be done with it too. Plugins make it super easy for you without having to know a lick of code.

But, there are some technicals to be handled…

Choosing A Domain

Building a website is like using a recipe. The first time you do it, you’re bound to make a lot of mistakes. But each time you bust out that recipe card, you get better and better at making it.

I’ve started dozens of websites over the years. DNS records can no longer scare me. Domains and nameservers? Forget about it! Your boy is a pro.

(Just kidding, I still have no idea how MX records and mail servers work).

And much like a recipe, it seems complicated on first glance.

“I have to do what now?”

“How much time until nameserver propagation?”

Just breathe. And take it one step at a time.

First off, you’ll need a domain. That’s the basis of any website.

I have the domain ready to go for this project. Again, I’ve been planning this blog for a little while, so I have had the domain on lock.

There was a day when I owned dozens of domain names hoping to use them for projects of varying lengths. Like I said last week, I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’ve learned to not follow an idea (and buy the domain) unless there is some real passion and some real juice there.

Buying Hosting

Next, the “hard” part.

After you buy a domain, hosting is required. Hosting is essentially a server which hosts your website and makes it accessible to people around the world. Without it, your website would just be “local” meaning only you could see it.

Attached to every website in the world is an IP address. When you type in a domain name into that navigation bar, the domain name reroutes to that IP address. You just don’t see it. You only see the domain name.

That is the magic of the Internet ladies and gentlemen. Instead of remembering a long string of numbers, all an Internet user has to do is remember a domain name.

Once you have hosting, you’ll need to point your domain to that hosting’s nameservers. It’s often easiest to buy hosting immediately after you buy your domain.

It’s just not the cheapest. Typically, hosting will cost you ~$100 per year. All in, we are probably at $120 after tax to launch your website. Not bad.

(Funny story: when I started my first website, I thought you had to have your domain and hosting from the same place. It was literal years later that I figured out you could have hosting through one company, and buy your domains from another)

Once you install Wordpress on your hosting, you can begin messing with your website. The first thing a person usually wants to do is install a theme. A theme is just what the website looks like. Over the years, people have built amazing free themes. There are also paid ones, but for now, let’s not sink you into more debt. I know that $10 per year for the domain was already steep.

Typically, any ol’ free Wordpress theme will do for a blog. I like HitMag. But these days, I’m a man who likes a little more control of how my website acts and looks.

For that reason, I use a no-code builder called Oxygen Builder. A lot of other people use Elementor. It really doesn’t matter how your site looks in my experience, especially in the beginning.

However, as part of my experiment in building a website from scratch, we are surely going to put that assumption to the test!

There are few other things, I do when setting up my website for SEO purposes. These include:

• Putting them on Cloudflare (a CDN)

• Setting them up with a free SSL Certificate (for HTTPs)

These are all what I put in the “advanced” category of website building. For now, you have what you need to start your blog for less than $200.

Now let’s get to work.

If you’re interested in hearing more about how to build a website from scratch with Oxygen Builder, what Cloudflare is, or how you can get an SSL certificate for FREE, reply to this email and I’ll help you out! ⤵️