This page is going to deviate slightly from my normal finance or travel related posts. I have been wanting to experiment with some way of keeping track of how I began blogging. Meaning, I get asked by people how I began down the path of blogging. It really is quite simple, but takes 1) a lot of work if you want to succeed, and 2) a desire to learn in a constant changing environment.
Back when I was in college, and in the early days of eBay, I used to buy and sell a lot of stuff. It used to be one could pick up stuff on clearance and sell it for a pretty decent profit, even after fees. Then the market slowly changed over the years, as well as rapid increase in fees, and the possibilities of making decent income from eBay became difficult. However, as I worked on my listings, I wanted to stand out and customize my listings, so I picked up several HTML books from the library to teach myself the subject. As anyone knows who works with HTML, it really is quite simple once you learn the basics. I was addicted to website building from that point on.
Over the years, I worked on small projects including my own sites to sell various things, as well as our wedding page. I learned a lot by experimenting, but I really had not kept up with the website building environment, let alone taken advantage of programs that perform a lot of the work for you.
In addition, I had various ideas of the years and amassed a mini collection of various website domain names in hopes of eventually doing something with them. I purchased my first domain name from GoDaddy. I chose to purchase my domain through GoDaddy because it was one of the most widely known, and I was able to earn cashback and use coupons to secure the domain name for really cheap per year. People I told of my idea really thought it had promise. However, implementing the idea would take a lot of work. It was not a “simple” blog.
Over the years, I had other new ideas, and would purchase the domain name using GoDaddy. Then there would be various really cheap domain name sales, typically $0.99, so I would think up some other new domain name to add to my collection. The problem with owning all of my domain names is I never really wanted to pull the gun to host the sites.
In late 2010 and early 2011, my full-time job became drastically slow, and I was told to sit there and wait for work to come in. I was too valuable to my company to just lay me off luckily. So at that point, I decided to purchase hosting and work on one of my sites. As I spent time every day researching and visiting countless forums, I had read about HostGator for website hosting. As much as I used GoDaddy for registering domain names, I did not like their interface throughout. So I decided to purchase hosting space through HostGator.
I was immediately amazed by the HostGator system. The website to purchase hosting was simple, yet very user friendly. Since I am a bargain hunter, I chose to purchase a 3-year plan. In addition, since I knew I possibly wanted to work on several sites, I chose to upgrade to the Baby plan, which would allow me to host unlimited domains. So I signed up and purchased my hosting space, and then needed to decide which project I wanted to work on.
I honestly had no idea which project to initiate, and the first of my website domains that came to my head was InACents. So I decided to experiment with HostGator setting up InACents. Again everything within HostGator was amazingly easy to use. I honestly had no idea what I even wanted to do with InACents though, I just liked the name when I bought it. That is when the HostGator software really came in handy.
I was able to install WordPress easily directly from within the HostGator control panel. Wow, that was easy! I did not even need to know a thing about coding. Just like that, the blogging software was up and running. From their, I just started typing posts, and I have found such a tremendous amount of accomplishment from doing so. The WordPress software and community is honestly quite amazing! Anything one could possibly think of has been thought of and someone has built an easy widget or plugin to accomplish the task. I really love getting in and tweaking my site only because it is so tremendously easy.
Circling back around, knowing basic HTML from my early research really helps build a solid foundation for knowing what is going on in the background. However, I really had to learn to put that knowledge to the back of my mind because the WordPress software makes everything simple without needing to code. Today my site continues to grow both in numbers, as well as my experience with the incredible software.
If you are interested in hosting your website using HostGator, you can save yourself 25% off by using coupon code IAC25PERCENT
To date, I have had so much fun with InACents, I really have not worked at all on any of my other domain names even though I have the hosting lined up and paid for in advance.
