| Services | Resume | portfolio | Tidbits | Home |
among our clients
|
Cornerstone Fund United Church Foundation Kiawah Island African Youth Alliance One Great Hour of Sharing |
staking out your space on the web
Occasionally, friends and colleagues will ask how one goes about setting up a website... or they'll ask about my personalized email address. So here's a little overview for those who want to enhance their web presence.
First stop: your own domain name
A domain name is the web address — like lovellservices.com. Even if all you want is a personalized email address, you need a domain name. A name costs about $10 a year and you can get one all sorts of places. I use dreamhost.com for all of my web stuff, as they have good prices and a nice array of built-in services. Expect to have to try several variations on the name you want, as many domain names are already taken — often by "sitters" who buy a name in the hope someone else wants it enough to pay the sitter a ridiculous amount of money. I won't do business with these people.
If you decide to use dreamhost.com, use promo code "lovellservices" when you sign up to get a free domain name registration!
Second stop: your personalized email address
When you purchase your domain name, you will get a free email mailbox — a nice feature, but perhaps more trouble than it's worth. I find life simpler if I just create my desired email address (like info@lovellservices.com), then set that to forward to my existing email mailbox. You can give out your fancy new address and not worry about changing anything else. When you change your internet service provider, you simply change the address to which your email forwards, sparing you the trouble of informing everyone about your new email address!
third stop: Putting a website on the internet
Plenty of software and templates exist to help you create a website — and the process of designing a website is more involved than this little article. But once you have a site created, you have to upload it to a "web host." Again, I use dreamhost.com. You do have to pay for website hosting, but unless you have a fancy site with tons of traffic (people visiting), the cost is usually minimal — often less than $5 a month (and even less if you pay by the quarter or year). Purchase a hosting agreement, then upload the website files you've created (each web host has instructions for how to do this) and voila! You're online!
Questions? Just drop me a line.
contact us
| email info@lovellservices.com phone 704.496.2660 fax 704.496.2661 |
© 2008 Lovell Consulting Services
