Making of my blog (Get a website/blog cruising in minutes)!

Well, when I was offered a free domain while upgrading my web hosting account, I really did not have anything in particular in mind and booked this domain. Though it was not a lot of effort to setup my own blog on the domain,  most of the time it led to finding the right template, finding right CMS, finding right plug-ins.

So, I thought if I note down the steps I have gone through it would be really useful to others who are setting up their blog and would be useful for me as well when I want to refer back. Here are the details what one really need to do to setup a working website/blog in minutes.

1. Get a domain and hosting space

If you are going for web hosting, you would generally get the domain name for free. It is extremely important that you pick a reliable hosting provider (as Neeraj learnt later ) and go through important features. Some of the important ones would be:

1. Bandwidth (in and out)
2. Number of domains per hosting account (Can get unlimited )
3. Space available (Go for maximum or unlimited)
4. Number of MySQL databases per account (should be in excess to 10, or at least 5)
5. 99.9% uptime
6. Customer Care responsiveness.

On these criteria I find Godaddy.com and hostmonster.com really good and reasonably cost-effective. If for legal reason you must have an Indian hosting provider, bickrock is a good one. Search on google for hosting offers (coupon) from these providers and you would most likely find one with around 30-40% discount for signup!

I personally preferred hostmonster.com as it supported unlimited domains.

2. Choose and Install CMS (WordPress)

Content management system (CMS) helps you manage content (posts, users etc.) without you worrying about the technical part such as HTML, database, etc. Choosing a Content Management System for your website can be tricky depending upon the nature of the website. If it’s a personal blog or even a little more complex website, WordPress is the answer. WordPress is simple and has loads of plugins available to fit the needs. I went ahead with WordPress as it is an exact fit for a personal blog website.

For more complex websites, you can choose Joomla or Drupal. You can have a look at this or this to see a website running in Joomla.

The above CMS would be provided by all the hosting providers by default and you would need to click a few links to install them and working.

3. Look and feel : choose theme

Getting a free wordpress theme is easy! you have plenty available. I chose this one named MorningAfter.

4. Write your first blog

That’s pretty much it for a simple website! Login to http://{site}/wp-admin and write the first post!

5. Important Plugins

Though the website would be running now, to get it cruising install few important plugins:

1. Akismet – Saves your blog from spam comments. A must-have!
2. Fast Secure Contact Form – It’s not a wise idea to leave your e-mail id open to bots, so, this simple-to-use plugin allows an easy-to-setup contact form.
3. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin generates sitemap of your blog automatically. Great to have and use it to submit sitemap to Google.
4. WP to Twitter – A nice plugin to automatically tweets new blog posts to twitter.
5. WPTouch  – A wonderful plugin to automatically convert your site to modern mobile app look-and-feel.
6. SocioFluid – A decent bookmarking plugin to display “bokkmarking bar” for most known services (twitter, facebook, reddit etc)
7. WP Super Cache – If you have moderate to heavy traffic, go for cache to increase the speed! If you just don’t understand the installation instructions, go for QuickCache plugin
8. There are many more, keep exploring and beware of the lousy ones written just for getting link backs!

6. Google Analytics

For in-depth analysis of visitors, install Google Analytics on the website and start tracking the traffic!

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Of course, there are so many tools one can use to track the traffic, ads, uptime etc. Would try to list down an exhaustive list sometime. For now, this much should get you cruising!