How to get your own domain name, website and email address
People often ask me to help them create a website. In the past I’ve tended to do all the work for them but this is getting increasingly time-consuming so I’ve put together this DIY guide to:
- Buying your own domain name
- Building a simple WordPress website
- Setting up email and web forwarding
My objective is to let people get their own ‘proper’ email and website address without having to pay a lot of money for hosting - just the cost of registering the domain itself.
While there are free registration and hosting options - Microsoft Office Live is one - I prefer the idea that people own and manage their own domain name. I also think that WordPress is a very good website system for non-techies (and for geeks like me, come to think of it). It is a content management system in its own right and you can use it to create professional websites or personal blogs.
So here goes…
Set up a domain name
I use 123-reg.co.uk to manage my domain names. There are other options, but this is the one I know best. Here’s what you have to do:
- Find available domain names. Use the domain search tool to find the domain name you want. You may need to experiment with different variations and/or accept a less well-known top-level domain (e.g. you might be able to get badlanguage.net but not badlanguage.com because someone else got there first). It helps to choose a company name in tandem with the domain name so that the two match up. Check out my article on how I chose my own domain name.
- Pick additional domain names. Consider registering several different top level domains, if available. This will make it impossible for cybersquatters to buy them later. Popular choices include .com, .net, .org and .co.uk. John McGarvey has written a very useful article on choosing these additional names. For example, I registered stibbe.net (my name) but also stibber.net (a common phonetic misspelling of my name). Similarly I registered GolfHotelWhisky.com and GolfHotelWhiskey.com (with and without an e).
- Don’t buy anything else. At this stage, you don’t need to buy any other options from 123-reg.co.uk - don’t get email, hosting etc. Just buy the domain names you want.
Set up a free WordPress blog
- Set up a WordPress account. Go to WordPress.com. Click on Sign Up Now!.
- Choose a blog name. For simplicity’s sake use the same name as the primary domain name that you registered early. (I’ve already registered so your screen may look subtly different from mine, but you’re smart and you’ll figure it out.) For the purposes of this tutorial, my blog is called Way of the Panini. I love paninis and I already registered this domain. Don’t worry about the .wordpress.com bit for the moment - later on I’ll show you how to make the domain you registered link to this site.
- Bingo! You have your new blog. Of course, you still need to go into the blog and set up a few things. Click on Site Admin. I suggest the following steps (use the Help button to get more advice - I’m not going to teach you how to use WordPress!):
- Manage > Posts. Delete the “Hello World!” post and create an introductory post of your own.
- Manage > Pages. Edit the default About page with some information about you and your blog.
- Manage > Links. Delete the two default blogroll entries and add some cool new ones. (Can I suggest adding this blog - a bit of link love would be nice payback for all this free advice?)
- Design > Themes. Choose a sexy new theme for your site.
- Design > Widgets. Add Text (put a brief bio in it - see mine as an example), Search, Categories, Recent Posts, Meta.
- Design > Custom Image Header. Definitely add a nice picture from your library.
- Settings > Reading. Switch on all the enhanced feed options (i.e. Add to Stumbleupon etc.)
- Take some time to experiment. Write a few posts. Try your blog on for size. You can always edit or delete things later. Here is my simple new blog.
Link the domain name and the website
- Go back to 123-reg.co.uk. Log into the control panel. Scroll down to Manage Domains. Select the primary domain and click Modify domain.
- Click on Web Forwarding. Click the Non-framed web-forwarding radio button and enter the full address of your WordPress.org blog. (In my case this is http://wayofthepanini.wordpress.com/). Don’t change anything else. Scroll down and click Update Web Forwarding.
- Bingo! Now when I enter www.wayofthepanini.com into my browser, it takes me to http://wayofhtepanini.wordpress.com. Now you can put the domain name on your business card or on your email footer and it’ll look grown up and professional.
Forward emails to your regular email account
- Set up email forwarding. Go back to 123-reg.co.uk and this time select E-Mail Forwarding. What you’re going to do is arrange for emails sent to a user at your new domain to be automatically forwarded to your existing email account. For the sake of example, I’m using Google Mail. Enter the user name and the forwarding address and click Update Forwarding. You can set up as many of these as you like and you can have several different incoming address go to a single recipient. This means that you can give people your shiny new address and continue to use your existing email system to read the messages.
- Set up Google Mail. What you need to do now is set up Google Mail to send OUTGOING messages with your new address as the reply-to address. Luckily for me, Google have already published detailed instructions for doing this. Now outgoing messages will appear to come from your new address too.
Next steps
- Buy the book. WordPress for Dummies (For Dummies)
This will tell you everything you need to know about creating a blog in WordPress.
- Read my blog. In particular: How to blog like a pro, How to write for a blog, Safe blogging, Writing for the web is not the same as writing for print and Free tools every blogger must know about.
- Use Microsoft Live Writer. It’s much easier writing posts offline than doing it in the WordPress environment, and the tool I recommend is Microsoft Live Writer.
Once your blog is big and popular, you might consider upgrading your hosting, and the following tips might come into play:
- Set up proper domain mapping. Wordpress.com can also do domain mapping although you may want to find a friendly geek to do the techie stuff for you. (Don’t ask me, I cost too much!)
- Get proper hosting. I don’t use WordPress.com for my own sites. I host them using NativeSpace but there are plenty of WordPress-friendly hosting companies. This takes more technical work - you have to install and administer your own version of WordPress and you need to set up your domain to link to your properly-hosted site. However, it is the more elegant, professional solution. Luckily, you can export everything out of your existing WordPress.org account into your new site when you’re ready to upgrade. These guys will also manage a domain for you and registering with them and having them host the site is another way to do this but, as I said before, I think it is better to separate hosting and domain management. Similarly, when you’re ready to upgrade your email system, you can use 123-reg to change MX records - I use a Microsoft Exchange Server and it works fine, for example.
And finally…
Feel free to comment and add additional suggestions. If you find this article useful, please add it to Digg, Del.icio.us or Stumbleupon using the links below. If you want personal technical support (even if you are my mother, my wife or my best friend) please send me chocolates, flowers and substantial cash donations before picking up the phone.
Acorn Domains wrote:
When using a 3rd party company such as 123-reg to register a domain name, make sure you do a WHOIS lookup here:
http://www.nominet.org.uk/
to ensure the name actually got registered to you.
Recheck the status often.
Admin
Posted on 07-Jun-08 at 8:13 pm | Permalink
Zapp wrote:
Acorn Domains, is right. Be careful where you search to see if your domainname is avaliable and reg. your names.
Im sure the blogposter has heard that the registrar “Network Solution”, register the domains automaticly after there visitors has checked to see if they are avaliable.
Whats wrong with that you say, well one thing, offcourse if you are the one who has searched for the domainname, then they will let you register. That doesnt sound bad you say? well it will now… the price they want is puf 5 times what it would have cost in other registrars. They say it is for your own good, yeah right, I bet it doesnt hurt when they wants 5 times the normal register fee from you.
I have two sites I trust, and use daily:
1. [URL=http://www.77gb.net]77GB.com[/URL]
2. Godaddy.com
Best regards,
Posted on 08-Jun-08 at 1:09 am | Permalink
Matthew Stibbe wrote:
I’ve seen two comments from other domain management companies making the point that you should check that you actually own the domains you register and be wary about the cost of transfering a registered domain away from a management company.
They’re correct. That’s why I recommend using a reputable company like 123-reg.co.uk. They don’t charge to transfer domains (in fact they give you detailed instructions on how to do it, if you want to).
In terms of checking the registration, it’s pretty easy using whois and with UK registrations you should get a confirmation from Nominet by post. But with a reputable company like 123-reg.co.uk (part of Pipex and in turn part of Tiscali - a big company with a reputation to keep up) it shouldn’t be a worry.
Posted on 08-Jun-08 at 7:46 am | Permalink
Domain Names wrote:
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Posted on 08-Jun-08 at 12:16 pm | Permalink
Toddie Downs wrote:
An additional point for newcomers to Wordpress: know beforehand whether you want your blog to have advertising/affiliates, etc. or not. Wordpress.com blogs do not allow advertising (absent one discreet link to your company); blogs using Wordpress.org blogging software can do whatever they want. Lorelle’s Wordpress blog has a great post on the differences between the versions at http://tinyurl.com/62ejn4.
Posted on 08-Jun-08 at 8:33 pm | Permalink
fordy wrote:
I agree with using 123-reg.co.uk for .co.uk and use godaddy for .coms. To find available domains checkout Available Domain Names
Posted on 08-Jun-08 at 9:35 pm | Permalink
Andrew Yeomans wrote:
If you wish to do any more than email and web, you should check out what DNS services are offered.
If you wish to use Google Apps for your domain (http://www.google.com/a/), which basically will provide you with corporate-style email, collaboration (sites and docs), calendars, then you will need to add your own DNS entries. Easy if the provider has this facility.
But I discovered when using Fasthost’s ukreg.com domain registration service, that their “advanced DNS control” only lets you set a website and an email hosting service. Nothing more.
UKreg’s service otherwise seems fine; and they explain how you can use a different DNS provider. But it’s a nuisance that they don’t provide the simple DNS facilities that other providers do.
Posted on 09-Jun-08 at 10:54 am | Permalink
Matthew Stibbe wrote:
Andrew makes a good point. I know you can do geek-level DNS stuff with 123-reg.co.uk (I’ve tweaked MX records and set up FTP addresses and other ‘advanced DNS control’ stuff). Not that I’m shilling for them, but I use them and they do the business for me.
Posted on 09-Jun-08 at 11:30 am | Permalink
Andrew Yeomans wrote:
To be fair to ukreg.com, I’ve now found they *do* provide additional DNS subdomain entries. But rather than put them on the “Advanced DNS” settings, they are found on “Web forwarding” - “Sub-domains”. So put this down as a user interface bug.
One other facility you might wish to check for, if using “masked” web forwarding, is the ability to point to other pages. So if you forward mysite.com to myhostingprovider.com/mysite/, it’s nice if mysite.com/contact_me.html gets forwarded to myhostingprovider.com/mysite/contactme.html, and so on. Not all providers do this.
Posted on 17-Jun-08 at 4:58 pm | Permalink
Alan Johnson wrote:
Thanks for the posting, have been looking into all this for the last month or so. Andrew Yeomans tells a similar tale to me, all my main domains are registered with UKreg. I was really interested in using Windows Live mail service or GMail for my domain’s email but have not been able to due to UKReg’s limited DNS tools (e.g.MX tools).
In past years I used email hosting, but find Exchange Hosting to be too expensive for what I use, and ‘cheaper’ hosted mail software limited on services.
Professional email is still a massive problem. I just don’t think small business users get value for money.
By the way, everyone has good and bad experiences with the same company. You are lucky with 123reg, but I had a nightmare with them and had to change away from them. It is definitely a good way to diversify the risk by separating hosting and domain registrars. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Andrew Yeomans have you found a way to use Gmail/Windows Live for UKreg domains??
Posted on 18-Jun-08 at 12:53 am | Permalink
Andrew Yeomans wrote:
@Alan: I’ve not done it with ukreg.com, but see no reason why the sub-domains can’t be used with google apps for domains. (I’ve done that with a different DNS provider). You will need to validate the domain using a metatag or a web page. You might need to point the web forwarding to the validation page as I don’t think ukreg passes on page names (as above).
Posted on 18-Jun-08 at 12:20 pm | Permalink
free image hosting wrote:
Good article, thanks.
Posted on 18-Jun-08 at 2:19 pm | Permalink
danny wrote:
thanks v. helpful you’ve helped a lot
Posted on 19-Jun-08 at 1:52 am | Permalink
Robin wrote:
I found this very helpful in setting up a domain name for the first time today so thank you very much. I registered my domain at ukreg.com as well but found the support sections on there a little hard to follow so it was a relief to stumble across this guide… Now to read the rest of them!
Posted on 22-Jun-08 at 12:21 am | Permalink
Val wrote:
Thanks so much, for a moment I thought I was caught up in a loop of wordpress credits and 123-reg offers.
Posted on 17-Jul-08 at 9:10 am | Permalink
Alex wrote:
I just bought a domain name and set up email forwarding to send emails to a gmail address as described above. It isn’t working. I downloaded the 123-reg guide to email forwarding and quickly discovered the problem. Basically, the likes of hotmail, googlemail, gmail ntl, virgin, orange and BT internet do not accept emails from the 123-reg mailserver and so emails sent to my nice shiny new domain don’t get through! Ah well, looks like I DO need to buy a pop mailbox after all… ?
From the 123-reg guide for email forwarding:
Why are my emails not being forwarded?
Most mail sent through 123-reg mail servers (80%) is forwarded using the free service we
supply to other email providers (i.e. yahoo, hotmail etc) such as the forwarding you have
created.
As this is a shared service, there are a number of factors that can impact on service which are
essentially outside of our control. Within a shared service environment other customers
through their actions can impact on other customer’s service on the same platform.
Furthermore, with it being a shared service, and more users on the service, it is more likely to
have in some circumstances backlogs of mail due to rogue users or other customer’s actions
could potentially get the server blacklisted. All of these factors can impact upon service and
are essentially outside of our control.
Unfortunately a lot of the emails sent through our servers are spam, the other providers see
this spam coming from the 123-reg mail servers and they black hole them. Yahoo is one such
provider; though hotmail, googlemail, gmail ntl, virgin, orange and BT internet do it as well.
This could cause your emails to be delayed or in the worst case bounced back. To solve this
problem you would need to forward to another email address or pop box.
Posted on 21-Aug-08 at 2:41 pm | Permalink
Matthew Stibbe wrote:
Alex - works fine for me. Your mileage may vary, of course. You can buy a POP3 server from 123-reg and get round this problem quite easily and cheaply if you have exhausted all the other options.
Posted on 21-Aug-08 at 2:45 pm | Permalink
Alex wrote:
After waiting a little while (couple of hours) I started getting the emails too, so it looks like using the 123-reg servers just slows things down, not stops them.
In the meantime, I came across google’s free offering called google apps. Quite a nice purpose made free setup which appears to prevent messages like “sent by xyz@gmail.com on behalf of xyz@your-domain”
The only problem I’m having now is that I am able to receive emails at my new domain from hotmail and google, but not from a couple of other places such as my work email and a friend’s work email.
The error appears to occur “while talking to mx0.123-reg.co.uk.” which doesn’t make a great deal of sense since I have changed the DNS to point at the appropriate google servers. That said, I’ll give it a go again a bit later - some of these things seem to take a few hours to settle down.
Posted on 21-Aug-08 at 6:20 pm | Permalink
Matthew Stibbe wrote:
Google Apps for Domains or whatever it is called is quite cool. However, if you change a DNS entry you may have to wait up to 24 hours for the change to propagate around the internet.
Posted on 21-Aug-08 at 6:24 pm | Permalink
Alex wrote:
Hmmm, it looks as thought somebody else had exactly the same problem with 123 that I am having:
http://www.unitedforums.co.uk/vb/webmaster-discussion/11358-mails-addresses-related-123-reg-hosted-domains-failing.html
I am about to send off an email to the guys at 123 just now…
Posted on 21-Aug-08 at 6:54 pm | Permalink
Danielle wrote:
I am using siteground.com right now and very pleased with their service. I got the domain name for free (yay!) along with the hosting package. Good features and very good support (they also install joomla for you !!)
Posted on 02-Sep-08 at 6:31 am | Permalink
cg wrote:
thx 4 ur article, it is very helpful for beginners.but please write it with the global perspective. Your article is for uk people.
Posted on 06-Sep-08 at 9:50 am | Permalink