As you may have learned by now, Staingirl Kaye and I have this thing about researching a topic to death. Kaye and I started talking about our blog in September 2008. We went to Wordpress meetups to learn more about blogging. For the first time ever I heard words such as “themes”, “skins”, and “ftp”, which flew right over my head. We incorporated and planned. Which platform to use: Wordpress or Blogspot? Hosted or self-hosting? We deliberated ever so thoughtfully about where to register our domain name.  

Fortunately, a phone call to Kaye from Michael Luo of the New York Times  got us off our duffs. Within 24 hours, we selected a webhost, our blogging platform, a theme, and posted our first blog. We even had Google Adsense up and running. And yes, it was that easy.

Don’t get me wrong, our research did pay off, and ultimately we made fairly informed decisions that we were comfortable with. We will do a separate post about selecting a webhost as there are many things to consider. But we also learned that a lot of the steps in blogging are easier than they appear. When we finally went onto the Godaddy website to set up our website, we found that we could select a website that already included the Wordpress blogging platform. When we didn’t understand how to do something, Godaddy’s customer service representative set the whole thing up for us.

From everything we had read, we were under the impression that we would have to learn html to write our blogs and load them in through an ftp (a function I still don’t quite get). And forget about those plug-ins! Well, it turns out that Atahualpa, the theme we selected, has a visual mode, which takes care of links and headers the way a typical word processing application might. And there is great support through online forums for “how tos” and troubleshooting.

Need a function for your blog? Run a search through your plug-in application, and with one click of the button you have your plug-in. Want to place an affiliate ad in your blog? Cut and paste, Baby! OK, it’s not always that simple, but we found that we learned more by doing and exploring the features on our blogging platform, than with all the copious reading we did. We also learned that very often these monumental tasks were not as overwhelming as they appeared.

We will be posting a lot of what we learned in the hopes of simplifying your journey. These posts will include our thought process as we made certain decisions in our blogging journey as well as short “how to” posts. And we hope you’ll share your experiences with us, too.

But probably the biggest lesson we learned throughout the blogging process: If you have an idea, and are itching to start a blog, don’t let the fear technical issues daunt you. Just do it!

Staingirl Kaye and I were so lucky. Thanks to my teasing brother, the name of our website and business had dropped into my lap (check out about staingirlz.com). We knew that staingirlz.com was our brand, was easy to remember, and would resonate with our target market. And the possibilities of what we could do with the name are endless – please ignore the fact that we are not there yet. We did not look to convert our name to a keyword rich name to steer more traffic, we figured we didn’t need to. Check out Problogger’s take on the brandable vs. keyword name.

We wanted to register our domain name as soon as possible. After all, we had heard stories of people losing names to cyber squatters and we didn’t want that to happen to us. The plan was to get the name registered right away and then take our time setting up the website. We could just look for a domain registrar, click a couple of times, and be done.

Well, no task is that simple when you have a lawyer and a meticulous software engineer working together. Of course we asked people we knew who had their own websites what registrars they used. We looked on the internet – and there is no shortage of advice on the topic. We read the warnings about certain services actually taking ownership of the name, and looked for legitimate registrars that gave us portability.

We learned about features. Did we want to get Whois Guard to protect our privacy? Will our emails be forwarded? Do they forward domain names? What about the pricing? How many versions of our names did we want to forward? Did we want our registrar to be our webhost? How many versions of our name do we register?

Godaddy.com seemed to pop up on everyone’s lists and had by far the greatest market share. We were set to go – or so we thought. Of course, the lawyer had to read the Terms of Service that turned out to be a whopping 14 pages long. And the Domain Name Registration Agreement was a mind-numbing 28 pages long. And let’s not forget the Privacy Policy. There were other agreements, but there was a limit as to how much one person can read – and the registrars must count on this.

Ultimately, we decided to take a pass on Godaddy. Staingirl Kaye found enough negative comments on Godaddy to give us pause. We have no idea as to the validity of these complaints. Staingirl Elle figures that Godaddy is fairly aggressive in its commercialization and a lot of people found it annoying. Apparently, when you attempt to register your domain name the process takes forever as you have to navigate Godaddy’s sales pitch for other services while registering the name.

Also, we were very taken aback when we read in the Registration Agreement that Godaddy provides a free Parked Page Service to its customers. Godaddy may point the domain name to one of its affiliates web pages, place advertising on the page, and “collect and retain all revenue obtained from such advertising.” In our limited experience and research, this was very unusual.

Namecheap.com was another that seemed to pop up. It is not necessarily the cheapest registrar, but we found no negative comments, until after we registered with namecheap.com, and it seemed to be well-respected. Also, Namecheap had several of the features we were looking for. There were a couple of technical issues during the setup that threw us for a loop. Keep in mind that we are two middle-aged bloggers who know nothing about setting up a website. However, the online tech support, although a little on the slow side, guided us through the process and we have now registered staingirlz.com and eight additional permutations.

In hindsight we realize that we probably wrung our hands a little too much. Afterward we selected the big, bad Godaddy as our webhost and are quite happy with them, but of course, that’s another story. In the final analysis, you just want to make sure that you register your domain name with a reputable registrar that will serve only as a registrar and not claim ownership of the name.

Our next post on the topic will delve a little more into issues to look for when selecting and registering your name. Let us know about your experiences, and what you would advise in future should we wish to register more names.