squarespace website design

How to get your website up and running in no time: guide part 3

Today is the third day of our web design guide, and I’m very excited about it because we are getting into the main part today, which is registering a domain name and hosting account to launch our very first site as soon as we finish the web design part. In our Seattle web design firm, we also do squarespace website design and use other CMS as well. So, let’s not waste any more time and jump into it.

Which hosting package you should choose, and why?

squarespace website design

As we can see, at the top of our checklist (see the first part of this guide), the first two things that we need to do are get web hosting and register a domain name. Lucky for us that we can get both of these at the same place which is a website called Hostgator. So you just want to go ahead and open up your internet browser and go to hostgator.com, or alternatively, you can just click the link from this article. Then once we get here, we can just click where it says web hosting in the top left and then click Choose a plan in the middle, and that’s going to show us the three different hosting plans. I need to be totally honest with you here – the business plan comes with a whole load of added extras you probably don’t need it this time, so that really just leaves it between the hatchling plan and the baby plan. The only difference between these two plans is that the hatchling plan allows us one single domain, which is one website and the baby plan allows us unlimited domains, meaning as many web sites we would like to host. If you are only going to have one website, we would recommend you go for the hatchling plan, and if you’re going to have more than one site go for the baby plan. We suggest that you should go for the baby plan as once you finish designing the first website – you obviously want to create and launch more sites to practice what you have learned in this guide.

Select your domain extension:

Once you’ve decided which plan you’re going to go for, just click underneath where it says sign up now – that’s going to bring us to the page where we’re going to register our new domain name for our website. So, if you have something in your mind as your initial web design project – type the name there. You can just type whatever you want for your domain name into the box, even your own name too, if you really want to have a personal site, and if the domain is available for you to register yet. We can choose our domain extension using this drop-down list on the right, and by domain extension I mean if you would like your domain with .com in the end, or .net or maybe something like .org. Most people want the .com extension as it’s the most popular extension among all and usually, we are used to typing .com without thinking much when it’s come to a domain name. Hence, getting a domain with the .com extension should be your first priority if that’s available.