This is the second article in a series about my web design mini business case study. It’s all about the my interactions with my first website customer Nick the painter. If you haven’t read the first article yet, feel free to go back and read it now before moving onto this one.
The funny thing about setting up a website is all the extra crap you have to do before you start doing anything meaningful about how the site looks and feels.
This includes researching and buying a domain, settling on a hosting company that seems reliable, and finally deciding on your content management strategy and software.
Once you take all that setup away, designing a website is what it’s supposed to be: a fun process.
My goal with Nick was to take care of all of this for him because it would just confuse things and get him thinking about the small stuff that, in the end, doesn’t really make much of a difference.
Prior to setting up any hosting or domain name I decided to research a few keywords. The obvious one “painting” should probably feature in the domain name. We would want some locality involved as well as we aren’t really after customers from Melbourne or overseas. And of course getting his brand out there would be important too – we need to dominate the search results for his name in case people search for him to find his website address.
There’s a whole tome of information written about keyword research online and if you search long enough you can find everything you need for free. For those that are just starting, I highly recommend you check out this excellent keyword research article by Glen of Viperchill – I am now using a similar strategy to this for evaluating keywords and markets.
Once Nick and I had settled on the domain we decided to make the purchase. As we were after the Australian and specifically Brisbane locality I recommended he buy a .com.au domain name.
I’m not sure about the validity of this little SEO fact so maybe someone can confirm but to my understanding it’s better to buy at least 2-3 years of domain registration as the longevity of your domain name is a factor in ranking algorithms of all the major search engines. I think the thinking behind it is that they need to know your site is going to be around for a while if they were to put you higher in the rankings. Even if there’s no truth to it it’s not going to cost you a lot as Australian domain names only run around the $12 mark per year.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve used Bluehost for a while now and never had a problem. There’s been reports of CPU throttling and so forth, but you’ll probably find a share of bad reports with many of the hosts around today.
Bluehost has always provided a pretty decent service for me and their software support is outrageously good. They use cPanel which makes installing things a hellava lot easier. And they also support a lot of third party apps to make your hosting life easier.
This all said I knew that I would be wanting start up several small websites in the near future as well as revamp my Dad’s business website for him. I needed some way to manage everything without drowning in usernames and passwords, login addresses and the hassle of setting up WordPress on each site from scratch.
My first solution has promise, but lacked a few details.
At first, I became really interested in being able to replicate WordPress installations by setting up a small base install with just the bare minimum of plugins that I use on all my sites. This would then be used to setup sites.. really fast.
It was a novel idea, but of course meant I’d have to setup and maintain a development site somewhere which included all the goodies I wanted to have in my base install. Not such a big deal, but it is when you need to update plugins, themes, and more and always keep your snapshot up to date. I thought about doing this monthly, and it would have been workable until I discovered something that was a little closer to my dream solution.
My second solution – the one I’m running with at the moment – was found while browsing around for details on the WordPress.org website.
I came across a thing called WordPress Multi-User and instantly wondered why the hell I hadn’t seen this before.
I’ve written about WPMU before so I’ll spare the gory details, but basically WPMU allows you to install, run and maintain multiple blogs (or websites, whatever) via one administration interface.
You setup WPMU using a sub domain setup so each new website gets a sub-domain of your site. For example, I could setup a store on codemyownroad.com and it would be called store.codemyownroad.com.
The beauty of this – and pay attention because this is where the magic happens – is that you can then map a domain name to this sub domain and brand it something completely different. To continue the example, let’s say I was selling T-Shirts for nerds from store.codemyownroad.com. I could brand it something like JoshsNerdyTshirts.com and no one would ever know that it was actually hosted as a subdomain to my codemyownroad.com website.
This was the perfect solution for Nick’s website. A way for me to get out of the hosting costing me a fortune upfront while still providing a quality service to him. A service that I could now administer a lot easier by having the website on my server.
The beauty is that because the site is still WordPress based, if we ever needed to move it to it’s own hosting account we could just install regular WordPress, install the theme, import all the data and switch the domain over to the new hosting account without harming any rankings or anything.
So to summarize what had been done up to this point:
- Checked on keywords and decided on some likely domains that could work.
- Bought a .com.au domain with 2-3 years of registration.
- Instead of setting up a new hosting account with WordPress for each site, I discovered the joys of WordPress Multi-User and set Nick’s site up with that so I could manage it easily.
- We linked his new domain to the subdomain on my hosting.
This is the second article in a series about my web design mini business case study. It’s all about the my interactions with my first website customer Nick the painter.
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Photo Credit: jared
