30 Minute Live Website Challenge
Woo-hoo, you made it…
Let me give you a quick overview of how this is going to work for you…
Firstly, I wanted to make this fool-proof (not calling you a fool or anything)… Awkward 🙂
But seriously, I’ve literally tried to make this as simple as “see this button, click here”, then “do this”…
And for that reason, something that will only take 10 seconds might have like 3 screenshots…
Don’t let this scare or overwhelm you…
NOTE: If things seem self explanatory on the pages you visit, feel free to carry on, knowing that if you get stuck you’ve always got this page to fall back on…
For that reason, I’ve made it this way so that you have almost got like a manual to refer to at every step, if you need it…
The point is this…
If you remember on the last page I said I want to shatter any limiting beliefs of what you’re capable of, and so don’t put any undue pressure on yourself…
Confidence grows by doing stuff, and this will be no different…
By the time you get to the bottom of this page you will have a website live that you have put up there, yes it won’t be the finished article, but it will be live on the internet…
How would that make you feel?
And it will take you about 30 minutes tops, probably faster if you have your card information already stored on your device.
At the end of the day, there are only 3 steps involved really…
- Buy a Domain name (what your website is called eg. Google.com)
- Buy Hosting (where the files of your website are kept, and how they’re able to be viewed online)
- Change some settings so that the Domain Name provider and the Hosting company can talk to each other.
That’s it…
Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?
Okay, so above each screenshot I’m going to give you a little text explaining what you’re doing, you will be working between 3 tabs including this one as we change the settings, so it’s probably best to do this on a laptop or desktop…
You are going to see the step number, a screenshot of the first page you will be going to and a ‘Gold button’ to take you to that page on the screenshot…
The new page will open in a new tab so that you can still refer to the screenshots for the instructions on this page…
Does that make sense?
Okay, let’s get started…
Step 1: Buy Your Domain Name
Okay, you’ll remember that as a Purpose Driven Expert we help people who are at the Problem Awareness stage, and we want our website to feel like they’ve arrived at the right place when they visit.
I want you to think about one of your services that you do, maybe the one you carry out the most and you receive several calls a month about…
I don’t want you to take any longer than 60 seconds to think about this…
The example site I’m going to create for you is for a Plumber / Heating Engineer…
We are not going to buy a domain with ‘Plumbing Services’ in and target that, we are going to target one of the services he / she carries out…
For our example it’s Boiler Repairs, as their customer knows they have an issue with their boiler, and I’m going to pick the city of Liverpool, so you’ll see from the screenshot below I’ve picked “Boiler Repairs Liverpool” and I’m going to attempt to buy ‘BoilerRepairsLiverpool.com”
So don’t overthink this, go one level down from your profession to a popular service you do and pick a main big city near you, like I said 60 seconds max for this.
NOTE: When you do your search, ONLY go for a .com (dotcom) domain as this is what we remember, people don’t remember all the other domains that are available…
NOTE: If your chosen service plus city is not available as a .com (dotcom), change to another service that you do…
Remember, this is a ‘Get your site live’ challenge, we’ll be adding more at later dates anyway, don’t let this derail you.
Once you have added your domain name to the cart, Namecheap will offer you lots of add-ons as Upsells, you don’t need any of them…
Just click ‘Checkout’…
Okay, this next step is important, make sure to leave the duration at 1 year to keep your costs down, and make sure you toggle the Auto-Renew button to the right so that it goes Blue.
This means you will never lose your site with an oversight of when it comes for renewal each year…
The thing about domain names is that you are only ever buying it for a period of time and have to renew it after that, I always have mine set to auto-renew after 1 year…
Then click ‘Confirm Order’
Okay, we’re almost there, now it’s just a case of creating an account with Namecheap…
Create a username and password and make a note of these to be able to access your account.
Once you’ve created your account, they’ll attempt to upsell you again with extras, ignore them…
Click the Confirm Order orange button…
Next, they’ll ask you for your payment details…
Pick your preferred option, the details will drop down, and once you’ve inputted them, click the orange Continue button.
Finally, we are at the Pay Now stage…
Do a final check under the Order Review that you have spelled the domain name correctly and if so, click the orange ‘Pay Now’ button…
Congratulations, you now own your Domain name…
That is the “Purchase Your Domain Name’ step complete.
We’ll be returning to this page again shortly to start linking everything together once we have our hosting…
Give yourself a pat on the back…
And let’s move on to Step 2…
Step 2: Buy Your Hosting
Over the last 2 decades I have had many different hosting companies, some good, some absolutely shocking…
It mainly comes down to a few crucial points…
Speed, Up-time and Customer Service responsiveness…
In our microwave culture we live in now, if your site takes longer than a nano-second to load, your visitor is ‘out of there’ hitting the back button…
Secondly, you only really get to know about the ‘lack of’ up-time when you notice a lack of leads or sales, which sucks…
And then finally the most important, customer service responsiveness can put years on you with most of these ‘cheaper’ hosting options…
I prefer to look at it like this, “How much is an average order?, how much is the lifetime value of my customer?, and will it hurt more to lose a sale than pay a bit more in hosting?”
And the answer to Question 3 was an overwhelming YES…
Which is why I only use and recommend the fastest hosting (period) with lightning fast customer service…
Don’t learn my painful lessons the hard way…
So with that said, let’s crack on and get our hosting…
Click the Gold Button below and then click the blue ‘Sign Up’ button on the top left of the page like the image below…
Once you have clicked the ‘Sign Up’ button…
Enter your email address and create a Password like it shows on the image below…
Then click the blue ‘Continue’ button…
When you get to the next page, keep all the default options as they are and you will be able to get started for just $1 for the first 30 days… (cool)…
Enter your name and preferred payment details on the page… (see below)
Then click the blue ‘Sign Up’ page…
Once you have clicked ‘Sign Up’ you will given your Order Confirmation number…
You can then click on the ‘Continue to Client Area’ button…
Some details covered for privacy
Congratulations, you now have hosting and we can move on to Step 3 and start linking the domain name to our hosting service…
Click on the blue ‘Create Site’ button…
Next, we just need to name your site like I have done below, just list your service and city that you chose that made up your domain name (Capitalize the words and leave spaces between the words)…
Next, click on the ‘Choose a location’ drop down menu…
See below…
And simply pick the location closest to where you are…
When you have picked a location, the Continue button will turn blue and you can click on it…
The next page you will see will ask you to ‘Enter WordPress Information’…
This is where you create your login credentials to get to the backend dashboard area of your website, so fill in your details and copy them somewhere where you can easily locate them on your computer…
Just leave the ‘Additional Options’ section as per the default settings you see below…
The gray ‘Continue’ button will turn blue once you’ve completed your details…
Some details covered for privacy
Congratulations!Your website is now live… although we’ve still to link the domain name to it…
However, you can take a sneak peak by clicking on the temporary domain name located as per the image below…
Some details covered for privacy
Okay, let’s get back to work, we’re nearly there…
We’ve arrived at…
Step 3: Changing Some Settings to Connect our Domain Name
This is literally ‘copy and paste’ easy…
We’re going to be going back and to from Rocket Hosting to Namecheap and adding the new settings.
So let’s start with clicking on the ‘Manage’ button as per the image below…
Some details covered for privacy
On the next page you will see a ‘Ready to go live?’ section where you can click the blue ‘Get Started’ button as below…
Next, enter your Domain name as per the way I have entered mine below, simply enter your domain name without any spaces between the words and put .com at the end…
Then click the blue ‘Continue’ button…
Okay, here comes the ‘copy and paste’ stuff…
Look at the image below (I’ve grayed out some personal info) but you can see the blue ‘Copy’ links
We are going to do this one by one…
Where you can see the 2 new TXT records, click on the left ‘Copy’ link of TXT record 1 Name (mine says _acme-challenge), yours will be different…
Now we are going to go back to our Namecheap page from earlier…
It looked like this…
If that page has timed out…
It may look like the one below…
Either way, once logged into Namecheap, you can always access your Domains on the left menu by clicking ‘Domain List’
When your domain is showing, click on ‘Manage’…
Once you’ve clicked on the Manage button you will be taken to the page below…
Click on the ‘Advanced DNS’ button as per the image below…
This is the page where we will add each new Record…
Click on ‘Add New Record’ to create our First TXT record as per the image below…
You’ll see that when you click on that link a new Record will appear with a drop down menu…
Scroll down to ‘TXT Record’ and click that…
Now it’s just a case of returning to the Rocket Hosting page to copy and paste these values into the fields you see below…
Here’s that page image again…
Repeat the previous step to create the 2nd TXT record…
When you have created 2 new TXT Records as per the image below, click on the green check marks to save both these records…
After a minute or so, you can return to Rocket Hosting and click the blue button ‘I’ve added the TXT Records, Continue’…
Some details covered for privacy
If you get the following message like I did…
Don’t worry, just give it another minute…
After a moment, click that blue button again and you will then be able to copy the next 2 records that need adding at Namecheap…
We are going to add 2 more records as you did before…
Click on ‘Add New Record’ again…
From the drop down menu of the New Record, this time we are going to choose ‘A Record’…
Like below…
Now copy the Value you can see on the image below using the blue ‘Copy’ link…
As you can see from the image below, type in the @ sign in the ‘Host’ field and ‘paste’ what you copied into the ‘Value’ field…
Then click the green check mark again…
Some details covered for privacy
And now we’re going to add our last New Record…
Click on ‘Add New Record’ once more…
From the drop down menu, this time scroll to ‘CNAME Record’…
And click on it…
Now go back to Rocket Hosting and click the blue ‘Copy’ link on the CNAME value as shown below…
Next go back to Namecheap and type www into the ‘Host’ field and paste the value you copied into the ‘Value’ field as per the image below…
Then click the green check mark again…
Now that we have changed the 4 Records, there is one record that we must delete before saving our changes…
Above the 4 we have just created you should see a default CNAME record created by Namecheap for a ‘parking page’.
As per the image below, click on the ‘trash can’ delete button to Delete this record…
It will ask you to Confirm, click YES…
The final step is to go back to Rocket Hosting and click the blue ‘I’ve Updated My DNS’ button to confirm your changes…
As per the image below…
If you’ve completed all these steps correctly…
The next page you will see will look like the one below with your domain name in the top left corner…
You can then click on the blue ‘Visit URL’ link to view your new site…
And when you click on that blue link…
Your site should look something like this with your domain name in the address bar…
Congratulations…
You did it…
How does that feel?
Could you let me know by dropping me an email here, I read all of them…
My goal of this free training was to do a couple of things…
- Break down the limiting beliefs a lot of us local service experts have about transforming our digital presence.
- Show you that you don’t ever have to be held back by greedy merchants who want to take advantage of you current lack of skills in this area and charge a mini fortune for something you could learn for a fraction of the price.
- Live up to my standard of giving value first as a Purpose Driven Expert…
Let me know how I did here.
I’m interested to learn how long it took you, send me the link to your site, if you’re excited by this milestone you’ve just achieved, and if you’re eager to continue your journey to build the site out…
This is just the beginning…
I can’t wait to hear about how far you want to take this…
Once again, give yourself a massive pat on the back…
Speak soon,
Mark
P.S. For you over achievers, keep an eye on your inbox for the next steps…