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How to Create Your Own Blog Site
Creating your own blog site might seem like a daunting task, and you might not know where to begin. Truth be told, it’s very easy to create your own blog site, and you can do it in under an hour by following these three simple steps. What are you waiting for?
So how to create your own blog site?
This post will focus on the technical aspects of creating a blog on your own domain and hosting. Forget about those free blog platforms. They are hard to customize, not easy to monetize and don’t look very professional.
So here are what you need to do:
1. Get A Hosting & Register A Domain Name
A web hosting is where you will put all the files for your blog for the world to see. We recommend using Fatcow. You can get a discount from Fatcow by following the link below. You also get Unlimited Disk Space, Unlimited Bandwidth, and FREE Domain Name from them.
2. Install Wordpress.
Most web hosting will have one-click installation for Wordpress via Fantastico. If you signup with Fatcow above, you should have be able to install Wordpress in a single click.
3. Start Blogging
There is no better time to start than today. Do not wait until you get every post “perfect”. Post a few before you go to the next step. This is the beauty of internet, you can change your blog post as many time as you want. This is not manufacturing some hardware where it needs to be perfect the first time it comes out the factory. Come back again and improve the post if you will, but don’t delay.
Good Blog Hosting – Join the World of Blogging
Are You Looking For a Good Blog Hosting?
Easy operation is the main priority for a good blog hosting. As bloggers are meant to concentrate in writing and presenting their stories, they should pay least attention on technical stuff like web hosting operation.
FatCow hosting, famous with its simplicity is perfectly fit into this scenario. With FatCow you do not worry whether you are a newbie to web hosting as you will atomically know where to navigate once you place your mouse cursor on their own-customized control panel. Believe it or not you will not need a user menu to utilize the hosting.
If you are looking for good blog hosting, FatCow is the web host that you cannot afford to miss, not only because they are easy to use but also the fact that they are one of the most popular blog hosting among bloggers. You can always find out more on this fatcow review site.
FatCow Hosting Features
- Hosting Platform: Linux
- Control Panel: vDeck
- Bandwidth:Unlimited
- Disk Space: Unlimited
- Add-on Domains: Unlimited
- Free Domain: Yes
- Email Accounts Allowed: Unlimited
- Forwarder, Autoresponder & Web Based Email :
- Sufficient Blog Software: Yes
- Google Webmaster Tools: Yes
- Google Custom Search: Yes
- 100% Powered by Wind Energy: Yes
- Bonus: Free $75 Advertising Credit
8 Basic Must-Have Plugins On Your Wordpress Journey
Wordpress is used by thousands of people around the world to create blogs. The Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine. In this post I have gathered these 8 very basic yet important wordpress plugins that you will never want to miss out if you were to build an awesome blog. Big thank you goes to the developers!
Akisme
Descriptions:
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches.
I have no idea how Akismet works but it really filter out spam comments effectively! This is perhaps the very first and the most important plugin of your blog.
Link: Akismet
Google XML Sitemaps
Descriptions:
This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.
A complete blog should always have a sitemap. It tells the visitors and search engines how your blog is structured and the location of each post and page (URL).
Link: Google XML Sitemaps
All in One SEO Pack
Descriptions:
Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
“But I don’t mean to optimize for Search Engine”. Come on, you need this plugin not because you want to optimize for search engine but you want to make your blog sensible! A general mistake most bloggers has in common is not having the right title and description for their post. For most of the time the whole blog is tagged with the same title which is a deadly mistake. Imagine your blog as a magazine. Will you use the same title over all the pages with different topics? With this plugin you are able to customize the title and description for each post.
Link: All in One SEO Pack
Contact Form 7
Descriptions:
This is a contact form plugin, which is simple yet flexible. Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup.
People hate email spams! Hate them so much! However we still love to hear from our readers. This plugin enables your reader to reach you without you revealing your email address. Even if the spammers try to spam the form, Akismet will be in place to filter them out. Thus this contact Form 7 is best coupled with Akismet.
Link: Contact Form 7
Subscribe to Comments
Descriptions:
Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!
This plugin gives conveniences to your readers to track the ongoing discussions in your blog. It is a must-have plugin to build relationship with your readers.
Link: Subscribe to Comments
Sociable
Descriptions:
Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites! WordPress 2.6 or above is required for this plugin.
Blog is meant for people to read. There will be no point if others do not know about your blog. With Sociable plugin readers and you can easily submit your writing to social bookmark for sharing.
Link: Sociable
WP-PageNavi
Descriptions:
This plugin allows a better navigation by assigning pagination to your post. You can choose how many post to be displayed in one page and navigate directly to certain page.
This plugin is meant for better organization. With this plugin your blog will look neater.
Link: WP-PageNavi
Advertising Manager
Descriptions:
This plugin will manage and rotate your Google Adsense and other ads on your Wordpress blog. It automatically recognises many ad networks including Google Adsense, AdBrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks. Unsupported ad networks can be used as well.
Only if you are doing advertising. By using this plugin you can easily embed whatever advertising codes in you post as well as page.
Link: Advertising Manager
Only with these 8 essential plugins, your blog is complete. Good luck on your wordpress journey.
How Much Bandwidth Does Your Site Need?
When you want to buy a web hosting for your website, the bandwidth is one of the major factors that you must be concerned about. How much bandwidth does your site need? Although many people recommend having high bandwidth, this is not an absolute requirement for all. In fact, having an excessive bandwidth may end up with tremendous frustration, since you have to pay a high fee against something that you are not actually using.
The Concept of Bandwidth
Bandwidth refers to the amount the data transferred to the visitors computer from your web space. In other words, bandwidth refers to the amount of data transferred through the network wire in a specific period of time. When you are planning to buy a hosting service, the bandwidth that your host will suggest you, is typically counted on a monthly basis. This is mainly due to the reason that the web hosting service providers pay a huge fee for their massive broadband internet connection. This is the few that is ultimately carried over to the consumers in the form of payment against their individual service plan.
Calculation of Bandwidth
There is a simple calculation for estimating the required bandwidth size of the website. The formula is: total size of the web pages in the site x monthly traffic volume = required bandwidth. I know it sounds confusing, but here is a brief explanation of the formula along with an example.
Say, you have 5 web pages in your website and the average size of the web pages is 70 KB. That means, the total size of the web pages in your site is 70 x 5 = 350 KB. Now, if your expected traffic volume is 3000 per month, your required bandwidth should be 350 x 3000 = 2.1GB per month. This is the simplest formula for calculating web hosting bandwidth. However, this does not mean each visitor will view all the 5 pages, so it could be less. On the other hand, if you offer any downloads or media on your website, you should take them into consideration as well when calculating the bandwidth. Also remember that .php pages are heavier than .html static pages.
Bandwidth Management
If your site allows download facility, make it sure that your hosting plan combines enough bandwidth option. Offering download facility for software, music, flash or video files requires sufficient bandwidth support. In fact, if you only host PDF files on your server, it will take at least 1GB bandwidth in your web space.
Therefore, if you want to manage the bandwidth size, you should be careful enough about choosing the web site components in order to keep the size minimum. As a matter of fact, you need to make the web page size as minimum as possible, because that way not only you won’t need to pay crazy fees for hosting, but also offer visitors a fast loading website, which is always a plus. Try not to use lots of heavy images in your web pages and when you use images, do not forget to optimize them for web. Moreover, you must not allow multiple files downloading feature and try to keep them under 1MB of size.
Web Site FAQ – What is a Domain Name Server(DNS) Record?
A Domain Name Server (DNS) record is a small set of instructions for resolving specified Internet domain names to the appropriate number form of an Internet Protocol address (an IP address).
Each domain needs to have a DNS record on the machine controlling the IP address on which a domain is hosted (nameserver). The company hosting your domain may or may not be hosting your website.
If you registered your domain through FatCow, your domain is most likely hosted by Fatcow. At FatCow, DNS records are located on the nameservers ns1.fatcow.com and ns2.fatcow.com.
A DNS record is basically a list of directions for where to send the web user. The three main types of requests from the user are:
- HTTP – Web page requests.
- FTP – FTP servers can be directed to the same or a different server than the web requests.
- Mail – The email can be sent to the same or a different server than the web requests. The mail entries in a DNS record are also known as MX records.
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