Host an author website?
Are you looking to host an author website like this one?
Why should you? Hosting your own website gives you complete control over the look and design. You choose the features. You can make backups. You can link it to Google Analytics to track your visitors and optimise your site to reach your audience.
Your site can have your name without the added “wordpress.com” or “blogspot.com” ending.
You can have complete control over your site and install whatever you want on it.
If you are an author looking to set yourself up with a website you can do so quickly and cheaply.
Check out the companies I’m using. I’ve used them for years for other projects and I really do think they are some of the best out there.
Geting started
I used namecheap.com to register a domain name (the name of the page <something here>.com).
I then bought hosting space from Site5.com to store the actual site. They are very cheap, offer some amazing deals, and have great up time (the servers very rarely have any issues so the site is always available).
Setting up the site
You tell namecheap’s server to point your domain at Site5’s servers by adding Site5’s “DNS” (domain name server) information to the DNS fields on your namecheap dashboard. That sounds complex but really it isn’t. You can find out Site5’s DNS information from your dashboard in your Site5 account then copy and paste that into the DNS field in the DNS section on your Namcecheap dashboard. It’s all very obvious when you see the dashboards but if you are struggling there is plenty of help available from both companies.
Installing the site
Once that is done (it can take a couple of hours for everything to link up) you install WordPress to run your site. Get the download file from wordpress.org not wordpress.com. The .com site is for hosting a site with them. The .org site is for getting the files to host your own.
Once you have the files you follow their famous 5 minute install process. It really is 5 minutes. It’s very easy and basically installs itself. All you need to provide is some basic info and the name of the database it will store it’s data in. The database you create in your Site5 dashboard. Again it’s very obvious how.
Final steps
Before you know it your site will be up and running. Then all that’s left to do is find a theme you like and some plugins to handle what you want the site to do such as display photos how you want them, link to social media, and so on, and there you have it. Your personalised site to start promoting your book.
I’d advise installing the “Yoast SEO” plugin to handle the Search Engine Optimisation. This makes it easier for google to find your site and helps you write content that will benefit your site.
Check out the offers from the sites below:
