It doesn’t hurt that WordPress is free, either.  It is an open source publishing platform, which means that developers have full access to creating their own customizations and additions to the platform’s functionality.  This results in benefits for you, the end user, because there is a great deal of customization available for your WordPress site for free or a low cost.

WordPress is a great choice if you’re looking to start a blog or if you want to create an attractive website without having much knowledge of html or other web languages.  There is a wealth of information available about installing WordPress on your own domain to be found, and many companies (Domain.com included) provide an automatic installation option.  With Domain.com, you’ve got two options for installation.  You can use our application vault to do an auto-install of WordPress (recommended for novice users) or you can do the famous 5 minute WordPress Manual Installation (the best choice for experience users).

The installation is usually fairly straightforward, even when done manually.  What to do once you’ve got WordPress installed may not immediately be quite as apparent.  The rest of this post will explore the best ways to make WordPress work for you as a complete content management system.

Why WordPress?

WordPress is most commonly known as a blogging platform, and that’s still its primary function for most users.  However, WordPress can be used as a complete content management system – that is, a database-driven website that uses the coding language PHP to produce dynamic web pages (as opposed to static un-changing pages written using html).  A great example of the ability to use WordPress for a complete website can be found being used by our friends over at Sprout.

Sproutinc.com – 100% WordPress-driven

By using PHP, WordPress serves dynamic content that is created from information stored in databases.  This allows things such as blog posts, pages, and sidebar elements to be pulled into a template that is specified by basic files utilized by all the pages it creates.   WordPress has become a popular CMS primarily because of its straightforward, easy-to-learn user interface combined with the flexibility to customize your sites using it.

Using WordPress

The WordPress Dashboard is your control interface for editing all aspects of your blog.  You access your dashboard directly through your web browser just like a website.  It’s arranged with links on the left to all the important sections of content control, a quick-post box on the right, and an overview of posts, comments, and other pertinent information.

The Basic WordPress Dashboard

When editing a post or a page, it’s as simple as using a document editor similar to Microsoft Word.  You can write in various styles of text, import images and media, and align everything as you please.

Writing a Post in WordPress couldn’t be easier

The basic settings for WordPress are vast and let you control every aspect of your site, but for the most part are simple to understand.

Ample settings to control all the functionality of your Wordpress-driven site

Where to Start

You’ll find that your fresh installation of WordPress comes with a default theme.  You can start writing and add content to your site using this theme, but you’ll quickly find yourself wanting something more interesting.

The default theme is rather… default

Luckily, customized WordPress themes abound, and many (if not most) are free!  Head over to the WordPress Themes Directory or search for themes under the “Appearance” tab in your dashboard and find one you like.  Installation is simple either by direct installation through your dashboard or by uploading a .zip file to your server.

There are WordPress themes for every style and layout you could possibly want

If you can’t find something that meets your needs at WordPress.org, there are plenty of other places to find excellent themes as well.  A few of the best include Smashing Magazine, WPThemes360.com, and Natty WP.

If you find a theme you like for your blog or website and later change it, you’re completely in luck.  Because WordPress is a content management system, themes are mostly interchangeable and you can change themes without having to significantly modify any content.

Once you’re familiar with WordPress, you can even jump into the Theme Editor in the WordPress interface and try your hand at editing your theme using basic PHP and CSS if you’re feeling adventurous.

Adding sidebar elements is just one of the many things you can customize with a little knowledge of PHP

You can go as far as creating an entire theme from scratch if you take the time to learn PHP and CSS.  Don’t worry though, you don’t need any coding knowledge to create a WordPress site that looks great straight out of the box.

Customize and Widgetize

Just like there are numerous custom themes available for WordPress, there are also thousands of add-ons and plugins available to add functionality to your site.  There are plugins for everything from weather sidebar widgets to post popularity ranking to poll functionality to post feature galleries like the one we use on the main page of this blog.  Check out the WordPress Plugin Directory to get a sense for all the different plugins that exist to make WordPress even more useful.

Here are a few of the best WordPress Plugins that we’d recommend for every WordPress blog:

Akismet – Akismet comes with every WordPress installation, and once you’ve gone through the simple set-up process, it blocks the majority of spam comments your blog would otherwise receive.

All-In-One SEO Pack – Improve your site’s search engine rankings by customizing your titles, meta content, and more for your posts and pages.

Google Analyticator – Integrate your site with Google Analytics to learn more about who your visitors are.

Sociable – Add links to all the major social media and social bookmarking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Digg  to your posts.

See Results

There are unlimited options to what you can do using WordPress.  It’s a great option if you’re looking to create a website without knowledge of coding, and can get you started with a great-looking blog or website quickly.  If you’ve never tried WordPress before, give it a shot.  You’ll be surprised how easy and intuitive it is to use.  Here are a few examples of great uses for WordPress:

Create a Social Media News blog that receives millions of monthly visitors

Start a photo blog

Build a personal portfolio site

Blog about your family

Build a business blog, like us!

Our Domain.com Decoder contest and Domain Day contests earlier this summer were both well-received, and we plan to keep going with that type of contest in the future.  We’re throwing around ideas for the next contest at the moment, actually.  Make sure to follow us on Twitter or Facebook to stay up to be the first to know when we have a new promotion going.  If you’ve got a suggestion for a promotion, or a deal you’d like to see us offering on a product, or general feedback, please do let us know through a blog comment or a message on Twitter.

At Domain.com, we’ve been making sure to enjoy our summer just like everyone else, but that hasn’t stopped us from making improvements to our offerings.  Many of the changes are subtle website changes to make your customer experience easier and more beneficial.  Our new domain discovery system (or domain search, in simpler terms) has been a popular update.  We made a big change to make the most relevant domain search results are easy to see and the user interface in general is improved.

We’ve also listened to feedback and made our support section more visible on our main page.  Support information can now be found in the upper right corner of the page, rather than in the footer (though if you’re a fan of the footer link, it’s still there).

We’re still offering a free domain with our hosting plans of one year or longer, so if you’re buying a hosting plan, make sure to check out buying a year of hosting up front to save on hosting and get a free domain (be sure to use coupon DOMFREE at checkout).

SSL Offerings

One of the new updates we’re the most excited about is our SSL certificate offerings.  SSL, or secure sockets layer, is encryption technology for transmitting data across the internet.  If you transmit sensitive information to or from your website (such as credit card info in a shopping cart, login information, or customer information), you need to have an SSL certificate to protect your information.  Since SSL certificates can be a bit complex to understand, we wanted to give everyone the chance to try out an SSL certificate for themselves.  We’re now offering a free 30 day trial of our GeoTrust QuickSSL Premium SSL Certificate with no obligation to purchase at the end of the trial.  We encourage everyone to give it a try.

Another exciting new update to our SSL products is that for a limited time we’re offering our GeoTrust TrueBusinessID w/EV for only $179 per year.  That may sound like a lot until you realize that we’re talking about one of GeoTrust’s top of the line SSL certificates that normally costs $799 per year!  This certificate comes with the highest level of available encryption, GeoTrust site seals, and the green verification bar for web browsers.  You can purchase at this reduced price for either a one or two year period, but if you’re interested, act soon.  The deal is available on a limited-time basis.

Thoughts or feedback?  As always, please leave a comment.

What’s in a Domain Name?

A domain is broken into several parts, but it can be simplified to a great degree.  Historically when talking about a website, you’d specify www.domain.com when telling someone your web address.  However, with most web browsers are now improved to the point where if you simply type “domain.com” the website will resolve without a problem.  Everything to the left of the TLD in a domain name is technically a subdomain.  The “domain” in www.domain.com is a subdomain of the .com TLD, and the “www” is a subdomain of domain.com.

The domain name system in general can be a little confusing, but it’s much better than having to type in the IP address that the domain name represents.  You’d end up typing 216.34.94.184 into your address bar to get to Domain.com without the domain name system. If you’re curious about more domain name system details, the Wikipedia page is a good place to start.

About Those TLDS…

TLDs are one of the primary measures used to structure the internet.  ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is the entity that coordinates domains and IP adresses for the internet.  This includes managing the creation of TLDs.  Each TLD is operated by a registry, and that registry pays fees to ICANN to be able to operate the TLD.  Domain Registrars such as Domain.com then pay registries to register domains for end users.

ICANN has historically been very strict about allowing the creation of new TLDs.  To this point, new generic TLDs have been rare, with .tel being the newest.  Each registry for specific countries controls the use of their country specific TLD.  Originally, the country TLDs were intended to help divide the internet geographically, but .com has become the dominant worldwide TLD instead.  Some country TLDs are still fairly restricted, while others have been opened to be registered by all.  For instance, to register a .ca domain, you have to live in Canada, but .me (Montenegro’s TLD) is open to everyone, and is generally presented as a good TLD to use for a personal website.

The king of TLDs continues to be .com, and part of the shortcomings of the country TLDs was that they were introduced after the .com standard already existed.  The intended use of .com for commercial purposes has never been fully followed.  Instead, businesses, individuals, and nearly everyone else choose a .com address.  The result has been that .net has become a backup if the .com you want to register is taken, while .org is generally used by most non-profits.  However, country codes have somewhat fallen by the wayside, particularly in the US.  This is beginning to change with new TLDs for specific purposes, such as .me for personal websites, and .tel for contact information.

See a full list of existing TLDs

The Future of the TLD

The stage is set for a dramatic change in TLDs in 2010.  ICANN has decided to allow the creation of numerous new generic TLDs as well as TLDs to companies for specific trademarks.  The details of the new TLDs and how many new TLDs there will be are still somewhat unclear, but ICANN has indicated that registry creation for new TLDs will be opened for many more generic TLDs than currently exist.  Many have suggested that new registries for TLDs such as .blog, .food, and others will spring up.  Businesses will also be able to become their own registry as well, resulting in closed registries such as .apple or .nike.

The ongoing debate about this issue is the intent behind creating new TLDs.  ICANN is looking at the issue from the perspective that the good .com domains are all taken and they want to reorganize the internet based upon TLDs having more meaning to the domain.  From a business standpoint, the new TLDs will allow businesses to fight cyberquatting more effectively.  Opponents to the new TLD plan generally argue that ICANN is simply looking for more funding and the changes won’t effectively make the needed changes to the domain name system.

Regardless of the ongoing debate, it appears that new TLDs are definitely coming.  When they’re available, be sure to check out Domain.com for more details.  Tell us your thoughts on the new TLDs in the comments or vote in our new TLD poll.

Find domains at Domain.com:

.COM | .ORG | .NET | .ME | .TEL | .US | .TV | OTHERS

At Domain.com, we’ve jumped in head-first to social monitoring, and while we are the first to admit that we’ve still got more to learn, here are some of the keys to our methods:

Start with Twitter

If you’re being talked about online, chances are the place that will provide the most immediate and highest volume of content is Twitter.  First off, make sure you have a Twitter account.  If you don’t, it severely limits your ability to respond to real-time social interaction, which makes social monitoring somewhat pointless in the first place.

Next, start using Twitter search.  It’s an incredibly powerful tool, and will only continue to get better as Twitter grows.  Search for your brand, related terms, competitors, and other relevant terms.  For example, some of the searches we run include Domain.com, domaindotcom, domaincom, domain, @domaindotcom, and other variants.  This will give you a good indication of who is talking about you on Twitter, how many people are talking about you, and what they’re saying.

The Best of the Rest

Twitter is a great start in monitoring the real-time web.  However, there are many other places to pick up on your brand mentions.  Here are some of the others that can return valuable search results:

Friendfeed is an aggregator where users can integrate Twitter, Blogs, and other social profiles into one online stream.

Facebook continues to move towards being a more open social network, and its search functionality is increasing.  Soon you’ll be able to search the status updates of all Facebook users who elect to have their profile information public.

Social Bookmarking Sites such as Digg, Reddit, or Delicious are a good place to search to get a good sense of your brand’s relevance and authority online.

Question/Answer Sites such as Yahoo Answers allow you to search through all the questions being asked to see if anyone has questions about your brand.

Social Search Tools such as Oneriot or WhosTalkin can provide interesting insights and uncover some search results you might otherwise not stumble across.  They aggregate searches from a variety of the smaller and larger social networks available.

Check for Comments

Forums and comments on blogs are still common methods of discussion, and there are some great tools to search blogs and forums across the entire internet.

Boardreader searches numerous message boards and forums acrosss the internet.

Omgili is another useful forum search that often returns fewer results than Boardreader, but also different ones from time to time.

Backtype is a highly useful blog comment search tool, as is Icerocket.

Google is Your Friend

Google is great for everything that isn’t covered by one of the above tools.  Make sure you set Google Alerts for terms you want to follow.  Use Google News and Google Blog Search to find news articles and blog posts that include a mention of the terms you want to follow.

This is all starting to sound like a lot of work, right? Numerous searches at well over a dozen websites can add up to a good amount of time involvement, even if you’re efficient about it.  Once again, Google offers a great solution: Google Reader.  If you look closely at all the search results pages on various social sites, nearly all of them include a link to that search as an RSS feed.  Set up an RSS reader, add each of your various searches to the reader, do some organizing, and suddenly you’ve got all of your searches delivered automatically right to you!  This way, rather than performing searches once a day or even multiple times daily, you can let your RSS reader do all the work for you.

Does it Matter?

Social networking and social search is becoming an increasingly important way that internet users browse the web, get feedback, and ultimately find you.  Social monitoring is not as easy as simply typing your name into Google to check search results, but it can provide a valuable and much more time-sensitive view of what’s going on relevant to your brand on the internet.  It’s definitely worth it to take the time to check in on the social web.

Joe Smith?  You’re Not Alone

Unless you’re lucky enough to have a completely unique name or organization name, you’ve got competition online whether you know it or not.  If you’re a “Joe Smith” or other common name, there are many other Joe Smiths out there that also want to be found online, and they compete with you as far as search engine rankings and on social networks using the same name.  There’s also a good chance that at least one of them is semi-famous.  How do you make yourself stand out from the crowd?  Read on.

A Domain is Still Home Base

The newest social network might be getting all the buzz and attention from media and blogs, but the best method of establishing an online presence is still owning your own domain.  Buy yourself your domain name – if www.yourname.com is available, snap it up!  If the .COM isn’t available, you’ve got many other solid choices such as .NET, .ORG, or .ME.

What to do with your Domain

Owning your personal domain name is a big step towards being visible online.  However, the driving force behind being found online is content.  If you have a domain name but it isn’t associated with a website, you won’t get very far.  Search engines and social networks alike both value new and fresh content and quality links to that content.  A static website is a good start, but depending on your needs a blog can be a better choice.  Wordpress is the most popular blogging platform available, and you can install it on your own hosting for free! We actually offer an automatic installation of Wordpress from our application vault for hosting customers – making it even easier for you to get started.  Wordpress is great for everyone from beginners to power-users, because it doesn’t require coding or html knowledge, and it has a great intuitive user-interface.  Wordpress is such a versitile platform, it even powers this blog:

With the growing number of social networks and websites that you can choose to have a presence on, it can be important to have a home-base to link back to.  Think of it like the backbone of your online nervous system.

Expanding Outward to Draw Others in

With the proliferation of social networks has come the ability to be in many places at once online.  The downside there is that only being in one place online is becoming increasingly ineffective.  Creating a profile on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn is a great start.  These are some of the biggest social networks, and they’re all great for connecting, sharing information and content and being visible online.  There’s more to each of these networks than could be explained in one blog post, but they’re all very intuitive, and the  best way to learn them is to dive right in and set up a profile.

If you’re already on the major social networks, consider some others that may be relevant to your interests:

• Flickr – A social network for sharing photos
• Dopplr – Share your travels online
• Yelp – Food buff? Review your favorite restaurants
• Youtube or Vimeo – Share your videos

Search is still what drives a vast majority of online traffic, so page 1 search rankings for the major search engines are key to getting noticed.  If you’ve got a common name, this can be difficult.  This is where having your own domain comes in.  Having www.yourname.com or similar, among other factors, will help you rank high in search engines.  Those social networks can also be a great way to rank well for your name.  Having twitter.com/yourname ranks well organically and you just might see your Twitter account jump up the search rankings.  If you’ve got a rare name, we challenge you to dominate the search rankings for your name!

If all else fails, Google has extended you a great olive branch with Google Public Profiles.  You can create a basic profile in Google that will automatically show up at the bottom of page 1 search results for your name.

End Result: Own Your Brand Online

The internet has undergone a huge mentality shift since the early 2000s.  In the early days of the internet, privacy was the norm.  Unless you were creating an online business, many people preferred to be anonymous and hidden from the public eye.  Now with the growth of the social web, being visible online can be important for a variety of reasons.  Job hunting, connecting with friends, sharing media, scheduling events, participating in organizations, and creating new connections can all be aided by being present and active online.  If you’re new to social networking online, take your time to learn what you’re doing rather than diving in head first, but now is most certainly the time to get your feet wet.

So what are you waiting for? Find a domain and start connecting!

We want to share our knowledge in domains, web hosting, SSL, VPS hosting, the domain industry, the internet,  uses for duct tape, the art of rock collecting, and so on.

Seriously though – Nameservers? Registrars? Registries? DNS? MySQL?  This stuff can be confusing!  We want to make it simple for you.

If you’ve got a topic that you think we might be able to expand upon, leave us a comment below and we’ll do our best to get around to writing up a blog post that addresses it.

First Up: A Common Misconception

Don’t let the operating system you’re using on your computer confuse you.  Whether you have a PC with Windows or Linux or a Mac running OS X won’t matter when it comes to choosing your web hosting.   Windows or Linux hosting specifically refers to the server that your site will be hosted on by your web hosting provider.  Both types of servers can interact with any computer via web interface or file transfer protocol programs.

So What’s Different?

The big difference is obviously the operating system.  A Windows server runs on the windows operating system, while Linux servers run various versions of the open source Linux operating system.  If you plan on building a website using Microsoft proprietary software (such as ASP.net, or Access databases), Windows hosting is the way to go.  However, Linux has matching solutions for every type of Microsoft server-side software, so don’t think you’re selling yourself short by choosing Linux.  In fact, due to the open source nature of Linux, there is often more software available for Linux hosting than for Windows.

Security, Costs, and Performance

Some argue that Windows is more vulnerable to attacks since its the largest operating system and hackers spend the most time on Windows looking for vulnerabilities.  Others make the counter-argument that Linux is less secure because it’s the most common server operating system.  Both opinions are equal parts right and wrong.  In reality, both Windows and Linux servers are regularly updated to prevent vulnerabilities and protect your website.  Good web hosts are constantly updating software to keep servers secure.

As far as costs go,  once again the open source factor comes into play.  Many sites (including Domain.com) offer Linux hosting at a slightly cheaper price than Windows hosting simply because Windows is more expensive to implement.  Windows is proprietary software and as such they charge higher prices for web solutions and server software.  Paying less as a hosting customer for Linux doesn’t mean you’re getting less.

Performance-wise, Linux often has a slight edge because Windows is billed as an “all in one” solution, whereas Linux is very minimal and flexible with the ability to build onto the operating system.

It’s all About Your Needs

When it comes down to it, the differences between Windows and Linux hosting are relatively minor, but those small differences can be important depending on what you plan to do with your web hosting.  From a customer usage standpoint, the software that comes with a hosting plan is one of the most important things to look at.  Each hosting provider packages different software and services with their hosting, so look carefully at the details of your hosting package.

For instance:

Here’s a side by side comparison of the Domain.com Linux and Windows packages.  Our hosting is very similar for both types, but one difference you can see is that each uses a different Perl Distribution.  If you’re not familiar with Perl, then there’s almost zero chance this difference will matter to you.  However, if it does, you’ll want to know about the difference before you make your choice.

Other hosting providers may have bigger differences between their Windows and Linux offerings, so make sure to spend some time looking at the detailed breakdown rather than simply comparing cost, disk space, and bandwidth.  Yes, the details can be a little confusing, but in the end doing a little research will be worth it to make sure you have a hosting plan that meets your needs.

We’ve made our Linux and Windows hosting plans very similar to each other and highly compatible with all the common website needs specifically to make life easier for you.  All of our plans offer PHP and MySQL databases which are required by many open source applications.  We’ve taken things a step further by providing you a complete application vault of software to automatically install on your hosting that includes Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal, plus much more.

And the Winner is:

As you can probably see, one option doesn’t have a clear advantage over the other.  Both options provide stable, reliable web hosting, and the differences are primarily in software.  Linux is touted by many as being the more flexible option of the two, which is often the case but depends on the individual hosting provider.   Overall, Linux has a slight edge as the default web hosting option.  The good news is that if you end up needing to switch between server types, most web hosting companies will help you do so.  As a whole, worry more about who you’re choosing as a web host and the software options they provide than about whether you’re picking Linux or Windows hosting.

Find out more:

Domain.com Linux Hosting Plans

Domain.com Windows Hosting Plans

Some topics referenced in this post:

Web Server | File Transfer Protocol | ASP.net | Perl | PHP/MySQL | Wordpress | Joomla | Drupal

This blog aims not only to inform you about all the great products we provide, but to go approximately fourteen steps further and keep you in the loop on how to make the most of your domain.  We’ll be providing how-tos that answer some of the most common questions from our customers, posting about creative things you can do with your website or blog, and tips and tricks to become an internet power user.

We encourage you to be an active participant on the blog by posting comments and giving your thoughts and feedback.