Thinking about starting your own website or blog? I did too! About four months ago I started this blog with two intentions. The first was that I wanted to learn about building websites (I’m the perpetual student!) and share my crochet and knitting designs with the world. I love seeing what everyone makes with my patterns and hearing about all the great things you make – both for yourselves and for charity. The second reason was to make some extra money to help support my family – more on this in a later post.
After doing A LOT of research (I’d hate to think how many hours!) I bit the bullet and gave it a go – and so far it’s going great! In the hopes of saving some of you time from having to do all that research yourselves, I’ve decided it would be a good idea to share what I’ve learnt on here and how everything is working for me so far. I intend to continue updating this page with more information as I go, so if you would like to keep updated with what I find out please follow my blog (link on the right hand side of the screen for desktop, at the bottom of the page for mobile).
The first step was to find a reasonably priced, easy to use hosting solution. I am not kidding when I say I spent weeks (possibly even months!) trying to figure out the best hosting solution. I finally narrowed it down to two options, Bluehost (details below) and Host Gator. After reading piles of reviews I finally settled on Bluehost as they offered a free domain name as well for the same price hosting as Host Gator. In the name of full disclosure if you follow the links below and do sign up for them I receive a commission from them, but even if this wasn’t the case I would recommend them whole heatedly! Also by clicking the ad below you will get a great discounted price of $3.95 per month – so it’s win-win!
The very first thing you need to do is to think of an idea for a name for your site or blog. I recommend also checking popular social media sites (Facebook, Pintrest, Snapchat) to make sure the name is available there too so you can use the same name. You can check to see if your ideas for a name are available as a domain name in the box below:
Setting up hosting with Bluehost was quite straight forward – I’ve have very little programming experience (literally some copy and pasting of code from my University days) and if you can use a word processing program, you can use Bluehost. If you head to Bluehost the first screen you’ll encounter looks like this:
Simply click “get started now” and you’re good to begin.
The next screen will ask you to select your plan. I chose the basic package which is working really well for me – it gives me everything I need to run this site. If you think you might want to start more than one website then I would suggest using the choice plus package as this gives you unlimited websites and is the same price as the plus package.
The next page asks you to either create a new domain name. Unless you’ve already bought a domain name elsewhere, simply type the name you would like for your site into the “new domain” box. Bluehost will tell you if this domain name is available or not. If it is unavailable (someone else already owns it) then they will give you a list of suggestions to use instead. I recommend sticking with .com domain type as I think it’s the most recognizable.
The next page is pretty self-explanatory…
Next you choose your plan – there are options here for lots of different times you can pay for your hosting for – I chose 36 months because it worked out a lot cheaper in the long run. There are package extras available too – you should choose those that you think you would find most useful – I kept SiteLock Security (as I wanted to make sure my site was secure) but I didn’t purchase any of the others.
Next up is the payment screen …
and then you choose a password…
The next screen will get you to enter your password and then you will get a congratulations on creating your new password screen. After that you’ll be asked to pick a Word Press theme that you like. Don’t worry too much about which one you pick here – you can always change it later (I did)!
After you choose a theme you’ll get these page…
Woohoo! You’re ready to start building your site! From here you can choose to let WordPress help you build a site, or you can click “I don’t need help” if you’re familiar with website building. I recommend choosing to let them help!
From here WordPress will talk you through how to begin producing your awesome new website!
I hope this guide was helpful. If you do start your own site, do please leave a comment below letting me know where it is – I’d love to see your creations too!
I bought the pattern for the Harry Potter mini amagurumi. I have one question – when working the body, the instructions say “as till you reach the middle of Harry’s back. There is no indication of how many rows of inches before changing colors. Any help?
Hi Sandi, thank you! When you work until the middle of his back I mean start working another round but stop when you get to the middle of his back and that is where you start the next round from. I didn’t put an exact number of stitches because different people change colour different ways and it can put the stitch count slightly out. Hope that helps and let me know if you need anything else. Thanks again, Heather.