How I Started Using Wordpress
Approximately 1 year ago, I launched a brand new website for music reviews that I wrote. It was a labor of love. I never expected it to be a hit, but I really wanted to spread word about some great bands that most people never heard of. I didn’t know a thing about html, and so I knew I needed a site builder.Everything had changed since the last time I’d built a personal website (late ’90’s) and I didn’t know where to start. Some friends had used GoDaddy, and so I went with them, and bought their Website Tonight program. Ye gods, it was terrible. Slow, glitchy, and not the easiest thing to find your way around. They had great customer service though, so I persevered and was eventually rewarded with a much better page building interface.
A few months later I began writing freelance. I really wanted a website to promote my business, but I just couldn’t face the tediousness of building everything from scratch, even with the new, improved interface. So I put it off.
Down the road, I had more ideas. A craft site. An affiliate site. Even a Christmas site, along with a few others that I’d shelved months earlier. But I couldn’t afford seperate hosting on each site, and pay for the site builder. At least not until they began turning a profit.
So I looked into a free html editor thinking that I could just bypass the site builder. But I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and it didn’t come with an instruction manual. Around the same time, a few friends were talking about HostGator and how they all had the “baby” plan. For $7.95 a month they had unlimited domain hosting. Granted, if you have high levels of traffic, you’d have to upgrade. But for me, it was a dream come true. I didn’t even know if I’d get one visitor, and if I got high enough traffic, I’d be more than happy to upgrade.
So I got a HostGator hosting account, and registered a few domains with GoDaddy (I know where to find good coupons for even lower prices than they list). But I still didn’t have a website to go with the domains and hosting.
I kept looking around. Several of my freelance friends had great, professional websites. When I asked for advice, there was an instant clamoring for “WordPress”. So I looked into it. For customization, all I had to do was pick a theme I liked out of the thousands of free ones available (the hard part is narrowing down to one). And later, if I changed my mind, or wanted to brand my image- all I had to do was download and install a new theme. The switch is so easy, and content rarely has glitches. Sometimes you have to work on the sidebar though.
But the real clincher for me, was when I found out that HostGator can automatically set up a WordPress account for your domain. I still dream of learning to code my own website, but I’d never have been able to do so much in such a short amount of time using anything else.
For why you should use wordpress, click here.
