Creating a website is easier than I thought

On a late Saturday night, I decided to explore setting up my own website. Felt like I was doing something that went out of fashion years ago but what the heck, better late than never. I was not 100% sure on what I wanted to do with it but I had some ideas so I began; surprisingly things turned out to be a lot more simpler than I thought.

First I visited goDaddy.com and looked for domain names, found a few interesting ones for ~$10 a year and added them to my cart after registering on the website. Wanting to look around a bit more for better deals, I postponed the decision to pay for the domains and let it go for a couple days until I had some spare time. Within 2 days, I got an email from goDaddy offering me a flat 25% discount on my purchases and I cashed in on the offer. I now owned a few domains - all .coms and each costing about $7.5 a year.

Next weekend, I decided to host one of the domains and explore adding a few things there. A few online searches and after going through a bunch of review comments, I picked webhostingpad.com as my hosting provider and got a $2/month solution with unlimited space, email accounts, and visits (more details here - http://www.webhostingpad.com/hosting-features.html) on a 3 year bundle. I had to shell out ~$75 in one go but I am all set for the next 3 years. I would have picked bluehost.com if I had multiple domains though. To complete the hosting process, I had to update the DNS entries for my domain which was easily done from the goDaddy.com control panel.

Next, it was time to design my website. webhostingpad.com offered a free web designing tool but I didn't like any of the designs. Some more Googling led me to weebly.com and one look at their homepage (http://www.weebly.com/) told me they had some good stuff. Off I went, picked a template and designed a few web pages by conveniently adding widgets to the pages. The design experience is similar to blogspot.com but the available widgets are a more simplistic on weebly.com compared to blogspot.com. I also added a blog page and was pleasantly surprised to see a that buttons to Like/Tweet the post were automatically added. Hooking up Google Adsense and adding Google Analytics to the page was done pretty quickly and I was all set to publish the page. 

Publishing the page encountered an error and weebly.com shot up a message box that had diagnosed the error to be the domain's A records and presented the exact text I should send over to them, including things like 'I want to continue with you as my host but want to publish the site designed on weebly', etc. Neat! I pasted the text as is in a support ticket and within a couple of hours the issue was fixed. I later realized that weebly.com takes up 50% of any Google Adsense revenues you earn on websites designed and published via their service, which sucks, but should be okay to get started. 

So in a few hours spent over a couple of days, I had my website up and running - it's all blank pages now but what the heck - I managed to seamlessly work with 3 different providers to get my site ready for ~$20 a year, not too bad, eh?