There are so many ins and outs of hosting and setting up a website that have been a little overwhelming at times. There’s been the domain, the hosting, the website, then WordPress, and all of the other things on the side to complement WordPress like plugins, assistant sites, WordPress user accounts….oh and then trying to figure out how in the hell to sign into WordPress with a newly created user and what username/password goes where with which site!? 🥴
Domain Registration
This was, not to my surprise, the easiest part of the entire journey. I have owned domains in the past and the process is relatively straight forward. First, search for your desired domain on a domain search engine such as GoDaddy or BlueHost.
First, find your domain, second, buy it, pretty much done! After you select your domain, you can, typically, choose to purchase similar domains. This is so if people type those into a browser window, you can have them redirect to your main page. For example, pretned you owned MySuperUltraCoolDomain.com. Now, someone typed in MySuperUltraCoolDomain.co or .info you could configure .co and .info to redirect to your .com site. You don’t have to buy any other domains unless you want to; however, t might be a good idea if you have a domain name that will pull in a lot of traffic.
The “Good” Old Days
In the olden days, when you bought a domain that was it, what happened after that was 100% up to you. Today, however, there are many options for what comes with your shiny new domain name. In my case, I bought a domain with a basic WordPress installation/configuration, email, and a plethora of other “doodads” and “gizmos” (cool stuff).
When it comes to buying a domain, figure out why you want a domain and what you will do with it once you have bought it. That will help you narrow down which domain registration service to use to purchase the domain. Mine was simple, I wanted WordPress so BlueHost was the obvious choice for me. I highly advise you to shop around and check out the different hosting sites and their features. Try to find one that fits your needs, vision, and goals, and your wallet! Check out Tom’s Guide for a great side-by-side comparison of some of the best hosts available out there.
WordPress
WordPress oh WordPress! This has been a huge hurdle to jump with the setup and administration. I have had so many odd things happen while I was learning to get around in the new dashboard, how to setup pages and posts, how to freakin’ rename a page and not break the entire site, color palettes…oh color palettes have left me with a level of anxiety that keeps me up at night, not really, but they have been very naughty!
Initial Setup
I have used WordPress in the past, but always on WordPress.com and not a self-hosted, or in this case pre-hosted, instance like I currently am. BlueHost automatically installed and configured WordPress for me.
The installation was a basic, barebones, no frills (that I was used to) setup. I had to, and actually had the ability to, install new plugins. Configuration of every aspect of WordPress was also available. I love this, but it is also frustrating at times. Setup for the initial blog was super easy. An AI agent helped to get the templates and skeleton of a site setup which was such a big help. If anyone has set up a WordPress site by themselves with no help, then you know how daunting this task can be at first.
Page & Post Setup
Page setup was actually pretty easy after the AI agent, thankfully, created the header and footer templates for me. The AI agent populated the pages with placeholder text which allowed me to quickly edit and update each one. After that, it was just a matter of filling in the blocks and updating images and links to things. I am still working on some links such as the social media links (coming soon!).
Unplugged
Plugins are amazing, as anyone who has ever used WordPress can tell you! There are so many cool things to play around with that you could spend several months just looking through them and still not have a site setup. When I first logged into WordPress and started editing pages, all of my familiar plugins were not there. Some plugins I used in the past that had always been available in WordPress were missing. I was a little confused until I realized I had to manually pick and install each plugin for my site.
This was perfect for a tweaker like me, seriously, I love this stuff! I added in all of the familiar plugins and even a few that I had never used or seen before. Some of the plugins were unavailable on free WordPress.com sites. I may have gone down a few rabbit holes for no good reason for things that I will never use, but…they looked cool!
If you are setting up a brand-spanking-new hosted WordPress site, make sure you check your plugins right away. Do this before you start editing to save yourself a little time. Also, before you make any custom blocks, make sure they don’t already exist in the plugins available to you.
Welcome to 404-ville
After creation of the site, one of the first steps is to create certain, almost essential, pages. Pages such as “About“, “Home“, “Blog” etc.
I knew of one other page that I wanted to add to the site so I created it. I gave it a slug (the text that shows in the browser bar and serves as the web address for the page such as “the-configuration-adventure-continues”). Realized I created the page without a template and so it was missing the header, footer, and color schema. I renamed the page and re-slugged it adding -old to the end. I created the new page using the correct template, named it what I wanted. The new page got the same slug without the -old at the end, and I published it. I checked the link in the navigation, beautiful!
Let There Be Darkness
I previewed my site, clicked the link for the new page, broken, 404. Looked at the slug shown in the address bar, it was referencing the old page in the trash, I restored the page, still 404, renamed both, 404, re-slugged both, 404, deleted both, 404. I finally purged the trash and cache, and the link was still referencing the old page (that had
-old at the end of the slug).
I spent over two hours working on this. Finally, I created a new page from the template, set up the navigation and previewed the site. When I hovered my mouse over the link it showed the correct slug, but when I clicked on the link it still pointed to -old even though I had updated the link to the new page, again, 404. I quick edited the page and added the -old to the slug, saved, refreshed, and finally it found the page, then I edited and removed the -old from the slug, and the link finally worked.
I have no idea why this was happening and the documentation was no help. This was possibly the second most annoying thing and I am still not 100% sure what happened and how what I did fixed it. If anyone is more experienced with page management in WordPress and could help me understand what happened, please let me know if you know!
Colors, Colors, and MORE Colors.
The biggest pains I have had are with the styles for the site. I had been working on the site for 4 days, and was finishing up the last page, editing text, adding images, and configuring the blog elements and queries when, all of a sudden, the entire color and font theme for my site changed! This has happened multiple times and there was no history of revision when this change happened so I could not revert. This was so damaging that I almost quit and gave up! Luckily, I didn’t. I found a cool color palette generator and uploaded my logo to it and created a color schema off of the image. Then set up the custom colors, updated the colors for the page background (I HATE white backgrounds on pages), links, buttons, fonts, etc. What a pain, but what a relief that I had managed to recover.
However, this same crap happened again…and again…and AGAIN. This was and is getting very, very old. When it happened, even the custom color palette that I had set up was removed! If anyone knows why this is happening or can help me figure out what the heck is going on and how to stop it PLEASE let me know. Until then, I exported my color palette I had generated from Coolers so I can recover again if it happens.
User Setup / Management
This was fun, and pretty straight forward.
Finally, I figured out I could create users for my site and now every page and post would be by authored by “admin.” Adding a user to your site is super easy in the user management tool and this should to be your second stop once logged into WordPress. Create yourself a user and any authors or co-authors, commenters, etc. that your site will need. This again will save you a little time.
This has been a huge undertaking, at least initially, and has been challenging and exciting. I am going to continue to bumble my way through everything and learn as I go.
As a perfectionist myself, let me just say this. Don’t let the fear of everything not being absolutely perfect prevent you from starting. It was the same when I stood up my first LLC. I had no clue what I was doing, but my accountant assured me “we can always change it later.” So, just start and remember these wise words:
“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”
G. K. ChestertonUPDATE
There was a setting in the wp-config.php file that was causing the issue with colors! The default was
define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true);Tech support was able to help me resolve this by setting it to
define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', false);No more unexpected color changes to my site when I click on pages or posts! ❣️
Still no idea why my social media links do not appear on the desktop version, however.