Friday, November 16, 2007

DanaPrinceWriting.com is finally online

My pseudonym.com has been taken for a long while but I'm hoping to nab it when it comes up for renewal next year. Shhh, the current owner hasn't updated in a while so I'm waiting patiently for it. Don't get me wrong on the pseudonym comment. Those who pay me and who have been paid my me know my legal name. I really am Dana Prince by birth but go by my married name in my off line life. Using my birth name gives me several benefits. I get a degree of online anonymity but I also get to see my writing with the identity I had when I first dreamt up my writing dream.

Anyway, I have been growing my business and felt like my free googlepage didn't display the commitment I have to professionalism. I wrote an article for a client last week and in it expressed the point that if you want to appear professional, your image will be hindered by using a free website to advertise your services.

Last night I took the plunge, finally and registered www.DanaPrinceWriting.com

Courtney Ramirez answered a question on the wahm forum about web hosting and I got a good deal with a Thanksgiving special 20% discount so I set up my website on Host Gator. Since I didn't use an affiliate link, I thought I'd at least give Courtney some link love.

My disclaimer: I know very little about web design. In my previous life as a purchasing agent at an IT VAR I was the department webmaster and used FrontPage but I haven't done any of that in years. I've spent the better part of 12 hours playing and I'm not anywhere near I am not nearly done yet but published my site a few minutes ago. I had no choice because my butt is asleep, I have only done a little work today and I'm a bit achy. I couldn't make myself stop until I hit the 'publish' button. I have a few pages in progress in the background and I think I might eventually build a blog and do more with the site but wanted to get it live asap so please feel free to stop by and drop back in here to give me some suggestions. It's very basic at the moment.

Thanks a million!
Now the fun of self-promotion begins.

8 comments:

WordVixen said...

It looks good so far! I was just considering hostgator myself (yup, Courtney), but I haven't tried to build a website from scratch since the mid-nineties. Did you use a template?

Dana Prince said...

Hey Vixen :)
It was the mid-nineties when I last did it too if you don't count blogging and making free googlepages.

I got 20% off using the coupon code TURKEY which is good until Dec 1 btw. They set everything up fast for me. It cost me only $36 for 3 months of hosting including my domain registration.

It came with free sitebuilder software that I just had to request and they e-mailed me my login for it in a few hours. I had to wait overnight to get started though as I registered last night at about 11:pm
There are other tools in CPanel that I haven't figured out yet as I've been mostly using the sitebuilder.
It's easy to work with but everything text wise is labour intensive and I've had a few navigational confusions. I also haven't been able to figure out yet how to read my emails on my new domain.

Now that my site is published live I can see a few minor problems with it but so far the experience has been fun and I'm happy with Host Gator's quick response. Do let me know if you go with it so I can visit your new site!

Anonymous said...

It's looking good so far Dana.

One thing that someone suggested to me when my first site went up was to make all the font the same. She said it was more professional. Not my opinion. I like to use different texts!

I'm at hostgator too. Great hosting and great support. If you decide to put a blog up there WordPress is the best one but there are lots of quirks with it. I tried for ages and finally gave up. But you can put up as many domains as you want on the site so that is kinda cool.

Looking forward to seeing what you're going to do with it!

Brenda Emmett said...

Way to go girly girl! I'm proud of you! That was a great big leap and you won't regret it!

I've been using hostgator for a couple of months. I need to spend some more time with it...

Good luck!

Dana Prince said...

Thanks Brenda!

WordVixen said...

Thanks for the info Dana. :)

I definitely want to sign up before the deal runs out (who am I to pass up free money?); I just need to figure out what domain I want. I hadn't realized that you could register a domain through them as well- they don't have it marked anywhere on the site.

Anonymous said...

It looks terrific Dana! :) I'm so glad you like Host Gator. The site builder software made a beautiful site.

Dana Prince said...

Thanks Danielle. Actually I tried to make everything the same font and size but in some page types it just doesn't look the same. The site builder had different types of pages and where I used different ones, the verdana font#3 doesn't look the same. A quirk I'll have to figure out I suppose :)