Domains

If you own your own website then you own your domain, or the website url. As long as you are in control of the DNS server settings, usually found in GoDaddy, or wherever you registered your domain then you are in control. I like to think of this as the same as the copyright to a book. As a webmaster I have dozens of domains and subdomains that I oversee on a regular basis. If you haven’t been up to the latest domain extensions, then you should go register a new domain for a few bucks. If you live in the United States you can pick up a .us extension for very little money. It used to be very difficult to get a website .com, and for the most part, it still is. But that doesn’t mean you have to be using a dot com. This site is actually a replica of the dot com original, but moved to a new server. Typically when I build a site I use my staging server, and build the site with no SEO on the staging server. The actual domain is not used but instead a prototype beta folder that allows myself and my client access while it is being constructed. The easiest method of disabling my staging site is to convert all of the pages, except the front page, to “draft” mode. Then it is impossible for robots or crawlers to accidentally find my site.

New Domains

One of the most amazing things happened when I created the website for my book, Angel Academy. GoDaddy created a new domain “.academy”. I think it was intended for schools, but can be used for any organization, or in my case, a book about an academy. At any rate, the timing was perfect and I managed to secure it and created an amazing parallax scrolling website that is highly entertaining and captures the reader’s attention for over 20 minutes. That website and my author site, AaronMStephens.com tend to keep visitors due to the amount of reading material available.

WordPress Plugin’s

Probably the biggest revolution to the web design/development industry is the advanced use of plugins.  If you weren’t aware of it, your website has a lot of functionality and that does not just mean pretty pictures. Some of the back-end logistics makes things very complicated and can even cause a website to not operate correctly. Plugins are software that interface and control certain aspects of the website. When I think about all the things a website has to do it can be a little daunting at times. Social media, blogging, eCommerce, liking, sharing, SEO, search engines, comment forms, and don’t forget spammers, back end links, and many levels of security. I use a couple of security protocols as well as a couple of SEO plugins. If you want to be listed at the top for searches be sure you update your site with new content, blogs, articles and sharable information.