Let me take you on a journey and share some of our technology story and learning so far behind Tech Skills Planet. At this stage it’s about the foundations and tool choices that can best support our goals. Later in the story it might be about the surprisingly awful choices we have made and how we adapted to them. If you can see something that takes you back to that dark time when you had to select a platform or tool and can see us making the same mistake – please share!
Tech learning is the cornerstone of what this community is about and in creating something that appears simple, such as a website/blog/newsletter there are many choices to be made as to what tools to use, how easy they are to use, up front costs, naughty year 2 costs that could catch you unawares…it’s a long list.
The plan behind our approach is to use organic growth of the community and bringing people together who want to learn from their peers around the planet about their personal and organisation’s tech skills journeys. At this point you have likely guessed correctly; these are the choices of people who have not raised $millions to begin and are watching the cents at the start of the project!
Website Creation, Hosting and Domain Registration
Where do you start with these three? For us it began with looking at searching for reviews of top 10 tools for both and then stand alone queries to start to narrow down what was going to work best. Knowing that blogging was to be a ‘must have’ and the fact that WordPress was powering so many sites globally it became a strong choice because of its versatility and support. Other creation tools were likely to be easier to get started with such as MailChimp and GoDaddy but for the extra time to learn WordPress, there are more options for the site in the long term. Being able to monetise later on (site sponsorship for example) meant that WordPress.org was preferred to WordPress.com. The extensive set of templates and plugins available for sites is also a huge benefit although another that can catch you out with some free and some chargable options so you have to go carefully.
Hostinger came up with some strong reviews alongside some agressive pricing in the market and decided to go with that which provided free domain registration (in year 1), WordPress.org hosting and email addresses. As an example of how to balance $ in the early stages the basic tier does not have a staging site and if this were a more complex setup I would consider the upgrade. Even more important if this was a revenue generating site.
Naming
Once we had some broad ideas for naming (and some that were just silly but not practical or seo friendly) we went back to a great tool from Verisign (Disclosure – I worked there when this was launched!). It’s a tool for looking at names and name combinations for domains. NameStudio gives you lots of ideas based on your starting premise and with some tweaking you get a wide selection of potential domain names and not just .com but .net and others.
There are a lot more of these small learning topics I will share over the months but to get started here were the key ones to date.
Technical Skills Learning
- Hosting Platform (with email addresses) – Hostinger
- WordPress.org – Working with templates. Website ownership, Site design and construction
- Website Naming
Let us know if you are using a similar setup and how you got on. What was your biggest challenge in getting started and what skill did you have to focus on the most?