HOW A FILMMAKER CAN START A WEBSITE IN 3 EASY STEPS

(MarilynFilms.com is an affiliate of Bluehost.com and WordPress.com. If you go through them and make a purchase we make a commission, at no extra charge to you. We promote Bluehost.com and WordPress.com because of their quality, not for the commission.)

So, you’ve been giving thought into starting a website? That’s great! Having a website is perhaps the most direct way of reaching your target audience domestically or internationally. With a website you’re not bound by physical borders, you can reach customers, fans, etc., the next State over or in a neighboring country.

Having a website will give you credibility because you’ll own a platform, business, consultancy, of your own. You write the rules, you set the prices, you build and engage with your audience, directly! With your own website, the limit is set by how hard you’re willing to work. By how much you believe in and are willing to promote your brand.

Another incredible plus of having a website is that it’s cost effective. You can have a website up and running in ten to fifteen minutes for as little as $5 a month. Incredible, right? Well, that’s what we did here at MarilynFilms.com and we’re going to share with you how you can do it as well.

STEP 1: REGISTER YOUR DOMAIN NAME

You need to register a domain name of your website. A domain name is simply the address of your website. For example, ours is www.marilynfilms.com. Every domain name is different, kind of like email addresses. No two websites can have the same domain name.

To register your domain name we strongly recommend Namecheap.com. Namecheap.com is an ICANN-accredited domain registrar with over 10 million domains under management. Their .com domains start as low as $9.99 per year and .net as low as $12.99.

STEP 2: GET A HOSTING ACCOUNT

Now that you’ve registered your domain, you now need a web hosting account. A web hosting account is a service that allows you to post your website onto the internet. Websites are hosted (stored) on specific computers called servers. When an internet user wants to access your website all they do is type in your domain name on the address bar and their computer will connect to your hosting server and your website will be delivered to them through their browser.

There are countless companies in the web hosting world that offer hosting services. We know, we did our research. In the end we decided to go with Bluehost.com, a hosting company in existence since 2003, and it was a great choice. Some of the reasons why you chose Bluehost are: 1) 24/7 customer service via instant online chat and extended telephone hours, 2) they power over 10 million websites worldwide and 3) they’re incredibly affordable.

You could register your domain and hosting account all in the same registrar, but it’s not advisable. This is due to security reasons and also if you ever need to transfer your domain name it can be cumbersome and time consuming. However, if you’ve registered your domain elsewhere, you don’t have to do anything except update your DNS settings to point to the new host.

STEP 3: INSTALL WORDPRESS.ORG

WordPress is content management system (CMS) software. Simply put, WordPress allows you to create and publish your content on the web. High profile companies such as The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes are among many who use WordPress to build their websites. You can download WordPress at: wordpress.org. It’s totally free!

WORDPRESS.ORG VS. WORDPRESS.COM

Despite the same name, WordPress.org and wordpres.com are are not directly related. Everything we discussed in this article applies to wordpress.org. The corrolation in the names wordpress.com and wordpres.org is because WordPress.com is owned by a company called Automattic which was founded by Matt Mullenweg (co-founder of WordPress).

We strongly recommend wordpress.org because with it you can modify your source code, or upload your own plugins, or extend the features. All of which you cannot do with wordpress.com.

However, wordpress.com may be a viable option for you if you don’t want to invest the time into learning how to fully manage your website with wordpress.org. WordPress.com is a fully hosted package. It’s pretty much a hands off approach to building your website and it may be exactly what you need. They offer different plans for building your website that range from free ($0) to business ($25) per month, billed annually. Check them out and weigh your options out.

CONCLUSION

By following these steps you will have a fully functioning website. Next you will need to select a theme for your website and you can either import the theme’s demo content or customize it with a page builder plugin like Essential WPBakery Page Builder or Elementor Page Builder.

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