Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
I
You might want to look at Chapter 10 now and make a decision about a domain name for your blog
even before you sign up. This is because your blog's domain name is part of its identity from Day 1.
There are several domain name-related options you need to consider.
Starting with a Custom Domain Name
Starting with a custom domain name right from the beginning establishes a strong identity for your
blog that doesn't change (unless you change your mind about the domain name later; WordPress
makes changing easy to do).
gvDaily.com, which belongs to one of the authors (Smith), is the fourth name that blog had in its
first four months of existence. The initial name for your blog can always be changed.
Adding a Custom Domain Name Later
You can always start with a free domain name, in the form
blogname
.wordpress.com, and upgrade
to a custom domain name later. Even so, the initial name of your blog matters—and, optimally, the
user-determined part of the initial wordpress.com domain name is the same as the central part of
the eventual custom domain name. For instance, if you want to have a WordPress-based website
called www.xavier.com, you will want your initial blog name to be xavier.wordpress.com, so the
move to the custom domain name is as smooth as possible. (People will search for “xavier” to find
your blog after you move it, for instance, and having the new domain name include “xavier” gives
them the best chance of finding it.)
Given that other sites will link to your site early on, via pings, trackbacks (see Chapter 3, “Creating
Your Blog's Look”), and explicit links, and that these links are the foundation for strong rankings on
Google and other search engines, you want these links to be going to your long-term domain name
as soon as possible. Friends and admirers will also bookmark your site the first time they visit it, if
they like it a lot.
This is an argument for deciding on and buying your custom domain name sooner rather than later,
so you don't punish your friends and admirers—and the search engines, as well as their users—by
inflicting a change on them after your original domain name has started to become embedded in
the Web. If you do everything through WordPress, it will do its best to keep your traffic coming to
you across a change, but no one and no software is perfect, especially when it comes to the tricky
subject of search engine optimization.
Back in the early days of Silicon Valley, there was a harsh saying for the need to decide early
whether to adopt a new technology breakthrough: “Get on the train or die.” (
Die
was shorthand for
miss out
, or perhaps suffer a business loss, rather than anything more serious.) If you're seriously
considering getting a custom domain name in the long run, you and your site visitors might be best
served if you do it sooner rather than later.
Using a WordPress.com Domain Name Forever
As we just mentioned, having a WordPress.com domain name, in the form
blogname
.wordpress.com, is not all a bad thing. With this kind of domain name, though, whatever
success your blog achieves will always reflect at least as much on WordPress as on you.
