.

ADDING A SUB DOMAIN TO A SITE: Where you might be familiar with the basic: sitename.com/blog or sitename.com/somethingelse is all well and good but have you never wondered how those clever bastards do the blog.sitename.com or somethingelse.sitename.com? I used to, then I got informed and decided to show others how to do it too!

I’ve been building facebook pages for ages but only recently got any good at it!

.
HOW TO FTP YOUR FILES: FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and what it allows you to do is pretty simple…

You know how you can drag and drop folders around on your Desktop and, say, into your My Documents folder to keep yourself organized?

Well FTP programs (like Filezilla) let you do the same thing – except you can move stuff around, to and from, YOUR computer and your HOSTING computer! Hurray!

With the latest editions of WordPress you can do most if not all of this from inside your WordPress Admin area – however this is a very useful backup way of doing things and, in my opinion, is required knowledge if you are serious about being online.

Relevant Links:

• Filezilla

.

POINTING OUR DOMAIN NAME TO OUR HOSTING ACCOUNT: We need to inform the company with which we registered our Domain (e.g. GoDaddy or NameCheap) as to where out site sits on our hosting account (e.g. Hostgator).

I like to do things this way so if my hosting company goes ‘belly up‘ I can get a new hosting account and simply change my DNS (Nameserver) settings over at GoDaddy and voila new site is up.

Also if I’m selling a domain name it’s really easy to simply change the ownership of the name to another person and the site itself doesn’t have to come into the equation at all – in fact I could simply buy a new, different domain name and point that at my current site. All of this would be tricky to do were both the domain name and the hosting be from the same supplier – see what I mean?

.

SETTING UP A HOSTING ACCOUNT: It’s just so cheap now to get a decent hosting account, shared or otherwise, and you really are spoiled for choice – but beware the crappy ones! I stick with the industry leaders both in the US and the UK and Europe. Why take a chance on some ‘fly by night‘ operation – of which there are many – for the sake of a few $$$ per month/year?

Relevant Links:

• Hostgator
• Heart UK

BUYING A DOMAIN NAME: Here’s a quick video about truly getting started on the WWW by buying your first domain name. So cheap, but renewable every year, and I recommend GoDaddy and NameCheap as good domain registrars.

Mind you GoDaddy is somewhat like a ‘pushy’ car salesman trying to sell you every add-on going but I suggest you ignore all that and get your hosting set up elsewhere – keeping your domain separate from your hosting makes sense.

Relevant Links:

• GoDaddy
• NameCheap

Test