Lesson #1- Purchasing a domain and mapping to your blog .. Etsy .. Ebay .. Twitter ..or any other space.
To have your own domain (or website) is a very easy thing to do! I have bought many domains over the last 10 years and used them in various capacities. To me, the hardest part of this entire process is deciding on the name. Once you have decided on the name (i.e. www.polkadotposies.com) you then need to check its availability. I have used 2 different companies to purchase domains - www.godaddy.com and www.yahoo.com. I prefer to use Go Daddy, but use yahoo because they host my store. Anyways, you want to make sure no one else owns the name that you are thinking about. If you go to godaddy.com in the upper right corner there is a domain search. You enter what you are thinking about polkadotposies.com/.net/.info or whatever and it will tell you if it is available. If it is not, then back to the drawing board. If it is, then here's what to do to make it yours!
It will display a list of all the available combinations of the domain name you entered. If this is for personal use, I would purchase the .com only, but if it is for professional use, I would purchase the four most common: .com, .net, .info, and .org. This should cost no more than $10 per year per name. The domains do expire! It gets cheaper the more years you purchase at a time. But beware of godaddy.com's checkout, they try to get you to add so many other things you don't need (if you're only mapping your blog, etc.). Just keep clicking checkout .. Checkout .. Because they will prompt you many times for other products. Once you have successfully paid, you just have to change a few things to point it where it needs to go.
Let's think of websites like library books. Library books are all lined up on the shelves in a some weird order. In order to find the book you need, you look in the card catalog (maybe I'm showing my age right now.) This then tells you where to look on the shelf to find your book. The internet is the same way! Godaddy is your card in the card catalog. You will tell godaddy where to find your place on the internet. You do this in the "domain manager". The second link under "My Products". Once in the domain manager (after you have logged on), it will list all of the domains for your account, when they expire, and their status. Click on the link of the domain you wish to configure. You only need to change one setting - Forwarding.
Forwarding is the place that you want to your domain name to go to - www.polkadotposies.typepad.com. This forwarding address is under "Domain Information". You will click the "manage" link and a box will pop up. All you do is enter the website you wish to map. It is that simple! Once you click OK it may take a few minutes for all of the servers to get updated, but within 10 minutes you should be good to go. An example is that I use to have www.polkadotposies.com go straight to my blog at www.polkadotposies.typepad.com before I got the store complete.
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have questions. Lesson #2 - configuring customized email with your domain name.
