Many people have asked me how I set up my own site at www.skepticgeek.com and migrated my existing blog from WordPress.com in the process. In this series of posts, I will briefly cover the steps I took to set up this site.
There are many guides on the net about how to setup your own website, so I will not try to repeat all that wisdom here. Instead, I hope these posts will be helpful for two reasons: One, many of the guides and tutorials on the web are outdated, as the technology and commerce landscape changes rapidly. Two, there are some unique considerations involved in hosting multiple blogs on one domain and migrating a blog from WordPress.com to your self-hosted WordPress.org installation.
Choose Domain Name
I used Instant Domain Search to search for my domain name. If you are looking to build a professional website, I strongly suggest going with .com domains, and avoid other alternatives. For personal websites, any domain name that fits your budget is fine
There are advanced domain name search engines like Domize if you want to use sophisticated search. I also read How To Buy Domain Names Successfully and 11 Steps to Buying a Domain Name That Doesn’t Suck.
When choosing your domain name, think into the future. You can choose your own name if it is easy to remember and short . However, your personal name as your domain name puts limitations on what you can do with it. If you envision the site to be used by multiple authors for blogs, or to build a user community, a generic name is more suitable.
Try to get domains that have keywords of your interest and focus in the domain name. You might also want to check if the corresponding Twitter handle, Facebook vanity URL, etc. is available while making your choice. I went ahead with www.skepticgeek.com only to discover later that the Twitter username was already taken, and hence had to resort to using @ScepticGeek on Twitter.
Do not buy the domain name with a registrar until you have chosen your web host. Read further to know why.
