WarmGlass.com

Hello everyone,
I'm choosing my first web host and am looking at BlueHost. I'm planning to use WordPress for my site. I've just had an online chat with a BlueHost rep about their extra fee-services (SiteLock Domain Security and Site Backup Pro). Does anyone have experience with any of this? I'll be handling my own web presence and learning as I go. Any words of advice?

What are you trying to achieve? What functions do you need from a website? Are you looking to:

--Have a unique domain name (aeshep.com as opposed to something like "aeshep.otherhostingservice.com")?
--Have an online "brochure" of your work, i.e., bio, contact info, places where your work can be seen/purchased, examples of your work, articles about your process, etc.?
--Display currently available work as well as a gallery of past work?
--Sell your work directly from your website?
--Allow people to fill out request forms/contact you via email from your website?
--Use email/twitter/facebook campaigns to lead people back to your website?
--Have a separate, private site (in addition to a retail site) for wholesale customers?
--Have an online journal (blog) where you can talk about work in progress?
--Have one or more email addresses that include your domain name?
--Or....?

How much experience do you have in building websites? And how much time do you have to devote to building and maintaining your site?

All that stuff influences your hosting decision. I usually tell people to start out small, with a hosted software service such as wordpress.com, Facebook and/or Etsy (depending on your objectives), and build from there. BlueHost isn't a bad hosting service (I use them for some of my websites), but unless you pay extra to them to build your site, you'll be doing everything (including technical maintenance and troubleshooting).

It's hard enough to get a good body of content onto a website, and update it regularly. If you start out with a hosted service, they keep the site running for you. Once you're pretty confident about your content, you can always move to the do-it-yourself stuff.

As for SiteLock, Postini, backup, domain protection, etc..they're all extra services that BlueHost (or most other hosts) will sell the heck out of. Basic hosting service is usually pretty cheap; the add-ons are real revenue generators. Again, if you start with WordPress.com, for example, you don't need most of it.

WordPress is free, and offers some pretty nice themes for artists (like this one: http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/hatch/ ). It provides free tools to promote your blog in social media services, gives you ways to track your site traffic, and if you want stuff like a unique domain and domain-based email you can add them fairly cheaply. (About $45/year to have your own domain, email and no ads anywhere on your site)

Terribly sorry for the long delay in response. Thank you, Morganica, for the detailed and very helpful post. I did decide to go with Wordpress.com and am currently learning the process by getting set up.
And you're right-just building quality content is a challenge. But I must begin somewhere and...so far, so good. Now if I can just find time to actually make some art!

If anyone else out there is thinking of using Wordpress.com and is also struggling with the thorny details (and there are many) I will do my best to share what I have discovered.

I have had a domain name for several years, which I redirected to my Etsy shop. Recently, I purchased the Coffee Cup HTML editor because one of my goals was to get a "real" web site up and going this year.

They have a great feature called an "s-drive", which is basically just their web-hosting service. There's a wizard that walks you through choosing a domain name, and entering a few parameters to get it set up. The hosting is $4.95/month. Publishing to the s-drive is as easy as a "File | Publish to S-drive". Yes, I know all you are doing is FTPing files, but they make it even more simple than uploading files with Filezilla or some other FTP client. Publishing is quite painless.

You have to be somewhat familiar with HTML to develop the pages (not much -- my skills are limited), but they do have some templates you can work from. The software itself is about $50, and then they have a catalog full of add-ons (where they make their money, I suspect -- at least on the software side).

So now my domain-name is redirected to my coffeecup domain and you can link to my blog and etsy from the site. I've still got a long way to go as far as getting the site fleshed out (it's a whopping three pages right now). I still plan to route any on-line sales, for now, through Etsy. I'm not ready to worry about shopping carts anytime soon.

Anyway, if anyone with marginal HTML skills is looking for an easy & inexpensive way to go, this has worked for me.

Dana W.

Thanks, Dana. I'll certainly make a note for future reference. At the moment, one of my domains is mapped to my site hosted at WordPress.com. No monthly fees, just the $13/yr charge for the mapping. I've got a good start and will stick with it for now.
I'm using one of their free templates which I've modified a bit. Not up to full (CSS) customization yet. But if anyone has any nifty ideas for jazzing it up without that I'm certainly open!