Build Your Own Website

Web Site – A Business Necessity

Every entrepreneur needs a web site to build their business – whether it is based online or offline.

Until recently the process of developing a web site or blog was both time consuming and expensive. Fortunately, today creating a site or blog is fairly simple and very inexpensive.

Before we get to the “nitty-gritty” of developing a nice new blog site for your current or pending business, we need to consider the different types of blog site options: free versus self-hosted.

Should I buy a site/blog or use a free service like Blogger?

This is an important question and it applies to more than just creating your blog. This same question applies to all areas of business tools since they all can have related problems. When you go with free services, here are several of the problems you could encounter:

The services post unrelated advertisements
There is minimal support
There are often glitches and bugs
You do not own or ultimately control the site
Limited flexibility in changes to the site configuration
You are enhancing the services site before your own

A Good Free Blogging Service

As for Blogger, you have no ads to worry about and I don’t know of any bugs however Blogger’s biggest limitation is the lack of options, and the fact that your ownership is very limited. For instance, if they, Google (they own Blogger) get a complaint on your site, they have every right to just pull it down – with no notice to you. This actually happened to me on a similar free blogging service.

If you are overly nervous about setting up your own site, I suggest starting with Blogger because it is fairly easy to set up and use.

A Better Self-Hosted Approach to Blogging

The solution I very much recommend getting your own domain, with your own hosting account and using a professional and highly customizable blogging platform such as WordPress (and the cool part is the blogging software platform is free too).

Benefits of having your own hosting account with the free Wordpress platform

Option of creating blogs that look and function like web sites.
Your own domain which increases your professionalism and search engine ranking.
Option of creating unlimited mini-sites for free (domain purchases are required).
Freedom of not getting your blog taken down if Google doesn’t approve of it.

Below we have provided several tips and a series of training videos to help you quickly build your site. This information includes tips on domain name selection, hosting, domain forwarding and setting up a WordPress blog on your own host account.

However, the most important part is knowing what to do, how to structure and use the blog. Some of the basic training needed for those tasks is located in McKay Earl’s Mini Courses accessed through the “Free Mini-Courses” page.

Click here for more general information about domains

Click here for an overview of selecting domain names