Alright ladies, let’s talk about HTML! HTML is an acronym for HyperText Markup Language, the computer language and basic building blocks of all webpages. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (yes, the infamous European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland) in the late 1980s and early 1990s and it standardized websites so that all computer platforms running various operating systems can read websites using a web browser. In essence, web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome are just HTML translators. Web browsers download information using HTTP, HyperText Transfer Protocol and translates it into beautiful, functional webpages like the one you’re seeing here!

I hope I didn’t scare you away with all this geeky talk, HTML was actually created to be simple. So even if you don’t have that computer science degree, you can start making websites in just minutes. Let’s get started, shall we?
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This tutorial assumes you have a registered domain name and have added it to a Dreamhost.com shared hosting plan. If you have no clue what all this means or are completely new to starting a website, I suggest looking into the following articles first:

What is a domain name?
What is web hosting?
How to register a domain name with GoDaddy
How to add a domain name to Dreamhost.com shared hosting plan

In this article, I’m going to show you how to install WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platforms, on your Dreamhost web hosting plan. I recommend using Dreamhost because it has one of the most user friendly and feature rich control panels in the industry. When I started blogging (more than 5 years ago), it took nearly 30 minutes to have WordPress installed and setup. Nowadays, with just a couple of clicks using Dreamhost’s “One-Click Installs“, WordPress can be completely installed and working in less than 2 minutes!
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Before starting this guide, you’ll need to have a registered domain name. If you have no clue what a domain name is, read my article on what is a domain name?. If you’re ready to register a domain name but don’t know how, check out my step by step guide to registering a domain name with Godaddy.

In this article, I will go over how to connect a domain name registered with GoDaddy to a Dreamhost shared hosting plan. At the end of this article, your domain name be fully functional and ready for you to start adding content. Let’s get started shall we?
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What are exact match domains?

Exact Match Domains or EMD for short are domain names that match your topic exactly. For example, if you want to start a blog about “polar bears”, the exact match .com domain would be www.polarbears.com.

Why are EMDs valuable?

Well, exact match domains have marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) value making them ideal in some situations. Let’s say you wanted to get a personal loan, wouldn’t a website called www.personalloans.com be of interest to you? It’s memorable, gives authority, and has natural direct traffic from people wanting a personal loan.

In terms of SEO, search engines such and Google, Yahoo, and Bing gives EMDs a certain amount of brownie points in search rankings for the keyword term “personal loans”. That is, with a little work, you can get this website to rank #1 for this keyword. This makes EMDs very valuable. In fact, personalloans.com sold for 1,000,000 dollars this year!
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This is a tough question to answer and to be honest, I don’t have an exact formula for you. Instead, I can give you an idea of how I like to choose a domain name.

General Blogs

The first question I ask myself is “what am I going to use this domain name for?”. For general purpose domains where the blog doesn’t have a specific keyword I’m focusing on, I like to go with a memorable .com domain name that has reference to your blog topics. For example, mominla.com is memorable (i think) and has “mom” in the domain since it’s a mom blog. To see if a certain domain name exist, goto Godaddy.com and enter your the domain name into the search box.
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If you plan on starting your own blog or website, you’ll need to register your own domain name and purchase a web hosting plan. Web hosting companies rent you space on their web servers (just a fancy name for a computer setup for serving websites) so you can place your data on them for the public to see. While starting a website in the past may take technical knowledge and expertise, starting a website nowadays is quite easy and straight forward. The control panels for most web hosting providers are very user friendly.

One of the questions I get asked all the time is if it is possible to host a website on an ordinary home desktop computer. My answer is always yes and no. While it is possible to do so, I never suggest doing so. This is because it’s complicated to set this up and it’s just no worth having your computer on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Just leave it to experts to host your websites usually in large data centers in the middle of America. There are network experts there monitoring the systems making sure things work flawlessly.
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There are two ways to start your own blog:

1. Register with a blogging website such as blogger.com, wordpress.com, etc…
2. Start your own website with your own domain name!

Free vs Paid

You can get started with blogging websites free of charge. Some websites may place advertising on your blog, may charge you for additional storage space, or have other upgrade options. For the most part, getting started is always free.

There are initial costs to starting a blog with your own domain name and web hosting. You can register your domain name with Godaddy.com for around $9.99 per year. GoDaddy also offers hosting packages starting at $4.99 per month. I’m using Dreamhost.com now for hosting and it’s $8.95 a month with a 2 week free trial with unlimited storage space and bandwidth, the amount of data transfer per month.
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I’ve stated in numerous articles to stick with using .com domains. This is because .com domains are the most memorable and has search engine optimization (SEO) value. Some people mistake .com for being an abbreviation for “company”, instead, it is an abbreviation for “commercial” and was offered to only commercial entities in the past. It’s part of the original group of General Top Level Domains (gTLD) when the whole Domain Name System (DNS) started in 1985. The original gTLDs include .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov, .mil, and .arpa.

.com, .net, and .org are now open for registration to the public, while the rest of the original gTLDs are reserved for schools, governments, military, and advanced research centers. New gTLDs have been added to the list such as .info, .asia, and .mobi. For the purpose of this discussion, we’ll only go over and compare the more popular .com, .net and .org. We’ll also cover .co domains which is predicted to be the next .com.
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