Last week, we started the Business of Belly Dance series. In the first post, you saw lots of great articles that get you started with your belly dance career.
This week, I have Part 2 of the Business of Belly Dance series, and we’ll talk about websites.
To appear as a professional dancer, you have to have a professional-looking website. But as a dancer that’s starting out, you probably don’t have the budget to hire a professional website designer. BUT creating your own website has become very simple, so even if you are not web-savvy, you can do it too. So in this video, I’ll show you how to create a professional-looking website yourself. Let’s get started!
Scroll down to “Step 1. Pick your domain name” to find the domain checking tool 🙂
Click here to go to Part 2 of this video.
To make your own website, you need:
Computer with internet connection – It doesn’t matter if you have a mac or PC, it all happens on the internet. I recommend you follow the instruction as you watch this tutorial.
Photos and videos of you that you want to post on your website
Text you want to insert on your website like your bio – you don’t have to have this ready, but it speeds up the process
Good chunk of time – I’d say set aside 2-3 hours if you are doing this for the first time. It’s not that difficult, but you don’t want to be rushed through this.
2 Components of Running a Website
First, to have a website up and running, you need to set up 2 things.
The first is the hosting service. A hosting company basically stores all the information about your website, and ensures that the data is accessible on the internet. So if the website is your store front, hosting is like a warehouse where you store what’s in the store.
And the second component is the website.
There are some free website creation options, but if you are a professional dancer, I don’t recommend this option. The examples of the free options are wordpress.com, weebly.com and blogger.com. They offer free hosting and website creation platform in one place, and while it seems like a cool solution, the biggest drawback of using these is that you’ll have their website address as part of your website address. So for example, instead of “yourname.com”, you get “yourname.wordpress.com”. This does not appear professional.
So here’s how you do it professionally without paying hundreds of dollars. I’ll show how you can do it in 4 steps.
How to Set Up a Website in 4 Steps
Disclosure: I have links to Bluehost, a hosting company in this post. These are affiliate links, which means if you sign up for Bluehost using these links, I receive a commission. I have these links here because I’ve been happy using Bluehost for a number of years, and the commission helps keep Sparkly Belly content free. Thanks!
Step 1. Pick your domain name
This is the fun part. Use this tool above ↑ and see if your preferred domain name is available. Your domain name is your website address (ie. something.com).
I recommend setting something easy to remember and spell, and make sure to use .com. You can claim other ones like .ca if you are in Canada, for example, but today, .com is the standard.
So don’t be shy, and try your domain name and click on “Check Availability” to see if it’s available. I always have so much fun thinking about different domain names, and this tool makes it easy to see what’s available and what’s already taken.
For example, I tried maobellydance.com, and it was available. 😀
Wouldn’t it be so cool to tell people your own website address? Well, you will be able to, soon 🙂
Step 2. Sign up with a hosting company
You’ve found a website address that is available, so now we’ll set up the hosting. Hosting is like where you keep all the information about your website, just like how you keep your photos and music on your computer, except that it’s all online. There are many hosting companies, and I’ve used Bluehost (affiliate) as my hosting company for a few years for different websites, and I’ve been happy with their price, service, and it’s easy to use.
If you used the tool above to pick a domain name, you can go directly to the Bluehost website by clicking “next”. (Tip: give it a few moments to see a screen like one below. It takes a little while and it’s so tempting to click on something else!)
If you use Bluehost as your hosting company, you get 1 domain name for free, so that’s nice. Otherwise, domain names cost you about $12-16 per year.
Fill up the form and sign up for a plan to make sure you don’t lose your domain name.
You can pick different lengths of time for your plan. If you are unsure about how long you’d want your website, I’d recommend going for the 1-year plan, and if you think you’ll stick to Bluehost after trying for a couple of months, you can upgrade it to the 3-year plan to save more money per month.
The rest of the stuff is optional. One thing I recommend you sign up for is Site Backup Pro. It’s important to have a backup of your website as you build contents on it. So if your website ever gets attacked or hacked, you have the reassurance that you don’t lose the content you wrote.
Step 3. Set up WordPress
Now we’ll set up a free tool called WordPress that lets you create a website without knowing how to code HTML, and it’s super easy with Bluehost. So once you sign up and log into your account, you’ll end up here on Bluehost. If not, it’s hosting at the top, and home. Scroll down to the section called “website” and click on “Install WordPress.”
Click on “Install.” Then pick your domain name. Click on “Check Domain”.
This is not going to install anything to your computer. It’s all happening online, so you’ll be able to make changes to your website from any computer.
Click on “Show advanced options”.
For Site Name, type in the name you want for your website. I put in “Mao: Belly Dancer in Vancouver”
And pick your user name. You can use your email address, or anything like “admin”.
Then password.
You can change this information later, but it’s easier if you set it up now.
Check the other 2 boxes, and install. It shows the installation progress at the top of the page.
Once it’s done, if you type in your website address into your internet browser, you should see this. Yay, it’s all set up!
Step 4. Create your website!
Now the exciting part, creating your website! And it’s pretty easy.
First, in your internet browser, type in “(your website address)/wp-admin”
And log in using the user name and password you picked in Step 3. Now you’ve logged into WordPress.
You’ll see your dashboard.
Now go to the top left, where there is a little house icon and your website name. And click on “Visit Site”.
You should see how your website looks like right now. If you like how it looks, you can keep it, but we have lots of options. 😉
In the next post, I’ll show you how to customize the website and set it up to make a beautiful and unique website. See you in Part 2!
