This Knowledge Base has two goals:

1. Provide an alternative to website builders that lock you in to using their other products.
2. Be understandable to those not familiar with building or hosting websites.

Number one raises portability. All websites can be accessed from any computer, but many popular website builders force you to use their hosting services. Imagine a nice gentleman who gives you a deal on a car…so long as you park it in his driveway and pay him for the privilege. There are good reasons to want flexibility with both your parking spot and web host. You may find that the gentleman isn’t so nice after all, or he’s unable to meet your future needs.

Chief Opurrating Officer Chalupa doesn’t like the expression, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat. For establishing your digital presence, we’re going to focus on just one to be as beginner-friendly as possible. We’ll start at the bottom and work our way up to you hosting your WordPress website. You’ll need a few things to get your business on the Internet:

1. A domain name. This is the name customers use to find your website, e.g., www.allmonsolutions.com.
2. A web host. Your host serves your website to customers when they navigate to your domain name. It does this by loading the files that make up your website to an always-on computer that listens for requests.
3. A website. Hey, the server needs something to serve! We’ll use the open-source WordPress platform (and other helpful tools) to build one.
4. An email address. This isn’t technically required, but you’ll want to communicate with customers in a way that reflects your business, e.g., [email protected].

We’re going to start with 1 and 4.