Creating and Maintaining a Personal Website

As a response to Suon Dondi‘s query here:

Personal Websites and Blogs

Most people maintain personal websites through blogs. A blog is what makes a personal website pertinent by posting updates every now and then.

When it comes to blogs, the first thing that should come to mind is WordPress. This is so far, in my opinion (and I’m sure a lot of bloggers will share my opinion), the best blogging platform.

A .com, .net, or .org domain name usually costs around $10 per year. That’s around P470 a year — cheap!:D

Blogger/blogspot actually permits mapping of domain names into your blogger blog. Say, you have a domain name at example.com, you can make it map to your existing blog at blogger.com so all your posts will appear within your domain name (example.com) and all your former permalinks (e.g., example.blogspot.com) will automatically redirect to your new domain name. This service is called Custom Domains. Refer to this documentation to set-up a custom domain at blogger.com.

But blogger.com alone does not offer that much flexibility as compared to when you host your own website. Hosting puts you in total control of your website. But hosting entails additional cost on top of what you paid for the domain name.

Web Hosting

For beginners (and residents of the Philippines), I highly recommend my former host — Ploghost.

A shared hosting is a convenient and effecient solution for beginners. Fees can start from as low as P75 (<$2) per month. For beginners with minimal traffic, a 2GB bandwidth and 75MB webspace is more than enough. You can just host your media files (e.g., photos, audios, videos) elsewhere (e.g., flickr, youtube, etc.) to avoid exceeding your alloted bandwidth and webspace when the time comes that you already developed heavy traffic and numerous posts and comments.

WordPress: Import, Design, Customize, and Posting

WordPress has a built-in utility to import posts and comments from your blogger.com blog and other blogging platforms. You don’t have to repost your articles one by one.

Designing a WordPress theme/template from scratch entails moderate knowledge in PHP and HTML and extensive knowledge in CSS. However, there is a vast collection of themes in the WordPress community that you can choose your design from and customize to suit you needs. These themes usually work our of the box, without further intervention from the user.

Customizing themes requires minimal to moderate knowledge in HTML, CSS and PHP, depending on your needs.

Creating posts and pages in WordPress, just like in any other blogging platforms, does not require knowledge in HTML or any other programming language. But basic HTML know-how is an advantage.

10 Comments

donditiples September 14, 2008 Reply

Very informative, Su, thanks! Will try to digest this some more, and when I finally find the time and the patience…who knows…

deuts September 14, 2008 Reply

No problem su. I just wanted to post this as well as many of many friends are in the same situation as yours, wondering whether they should get a domain and start blogging themselves.

If you have further questions or need a hand, just do drop a line in this thread.

xxx September 19, 2008 Reply

iv’e noticed major changes in your website since I last visited. So many ads now. How much money does a blogger make from ads?

deuts September 19, 2008 Reply

@xxx, it seems that you only visit this website. Visit other blogs and you’ll see a lot more ads than this. I’m only employing google adsense–nothing more.

How much money? It depends on your hard work. How often and how relevant are your contents.

deuts September 23, 2008 Reply

Madami ka lng links na nakikita, ads na kagad. Hindi lahat ng links na yan advertisement. 😀

xxx September 23, 2008 Reply

How does it work? per visitor ba or per click dun sa add?

deuts September 23, 2008 Reply

Per click.

deuts October 21, 2008 Reply

Yo, xxx, inayos ko na layout ng website ko. Sana magustuhan mo! 😀

Sauravjit February 20, 2009 Reply

hi,I m going to switch to own domain name with blogger”custom domain names”
is it fine?
and also I want to buy webspace/hosting for my site in order to make it fast but I dont have any knowledge of FTP,How can I do that in this case????

deuts February 20, 2009 Reply

Right now, I don’t think it will take you any faster when uploading your blogger files on your own webhost (instead of hosting them on blogspot). It used to be, maybe.

I hope I can be of any more help.

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