There is nothing that defines your web presence and online brand more than your domain name. You NEED to own it.

The Good

When you own your own domain name, you can leave anytime. You can go to a new designer, a new company. You can use another email system.

You can login to your domain registrar account and in a matter of minutes do whatever you need to do with it.

More than anything… you will own your name, your brand, the center of your online presence.

If you “bought” your domain name through your web design company and you don’t know how to access or transfer it without asking their customer support, you don’t own your domain. You are merely renting.

At the first chance possible, you should transfer your domain to an account outside of the site itself so that you can own it.

The Bad & The Ugly

I have had way too many new clients tell me horror stories about trying to get a domain name back because they originally bought it through their last web designer.

Sometimes it is just poor communication skills, occasionally the designer is no longer in business, sometimes it is just lack of motivation because the web designer or company has to put forth effort to LOSE a client.

Once in a while, it is even downright malicious, unprofessional behavior when someone decides they will hold a domain name hostage. No matter the reason, this is wrong.

But you can avoid all of these things if you just purchase your domain name outside of the place you hire to design and build your website.

Where to buy domain names

We recommend a few companies that we have good experiences with:

• NameCheap.com
• Dotster.com
• Register.com
• eNom.com

Share your domain name Experiences:

Have any good domain registrars to recommend? Bad ones to avoid? Web company horror stories? Please share by leaving a comment…

There are a lot of ways to get online quickly and inexpensively these days. But you are doing yourself and your business a disservice if you do not own a custom domain name.

Does your blog or website address look like any of these?

• myname.wordpress.com
• mycompany.blogspot.com
• johnsmith.squarespace.com

For $10/year you can own a custom domain name.

• nyname.com
• mycompany.com

Doesn’t that sound better?

Plus you can get email at that domain name now. Using an email like info@mydomain.com sounds so much more professional than myname@yahoo.com or mycoolnickname@aol.com. Don’t laugh. I still see people using AOL email addresses.

Whether it is your personal blog or your company, spend $10 on a domain name and increase your brand recognition and the impression people will have when they visit your site or send you an email.

Some places to buy a domain name:

• NameCheap.com
• Dotster.com
• eNom.com
• Register.com

We are so pleased to announce new homepage options to all our themes. Add Sliding Panels and a Welcome Message, a Video, a Slideshow, or Featured Links. Add them in any combination, or all at once. Now you can COMPLETELY customize your site! You can easily create an online presence that cohesively matches your brand and the UNIQUE way you market your business.

Now with Homepage Options, Blog Options, Font Options, Fonts Sizing, Color Options, and New Style Options you can truly create an online brand that is unlike anyone else. You can’t do that with a template website!

You can turn on and off the sections you want to be public. You can change your site daily, adding feature sections for different times and promotions. Market your studio the way you want instead of trying to fit a cookie cutter site. As you can see the possibilities are endless!

Sliding Panels, Welcome Message, Featured Links

Slideshow with Featured Links

Video

You can add video to any page of your site, we’ve just made it incredibly easy to add to your homepage.

All Sections Together

This is a sample of all the sections together. They can be reordered by dragging and dropping them into place in the back end.

A look at the back end

This is the new Homepage Options, and what you see in the back end of your site. You can easily drag and drop a section in the order you wish.

And with the Welcome message area, you can specifically edit the font size, font color, and even the fonts themselves. You can also choose which side the sliding panels and welcome message are on.

Make your site your own

Give your clients many doors into your site and a reason to stay and discover who you are as a photographer, as a studio as a business. This is what your online branding is all about. Creating a presence that is uniquely yours.

Photo credits: Justine Ungaro, Mi Belle Inc, Monachetti Films

Last night we found a great resource for WordPress tutorial videos. So great that we had to immediately add them to the site. Every site now has more than 30 screen sharing tutorials for every basic tool in a WordPress site right from their admin area!

There is also a text version that can be clicked though. It was even built with a menu that resembles the standard WordPress menu to keep things working consistently.

We also made a small change to the menu, moving the Support menu right up top near the dashboard menu for easier access.

You can still find the FAQ’s, links to our Getting Started Guide and forums there as well. And of course if you find anything that needs fixing or just have a suggestion for us, use the support tickets to let us know.

Once you have your website up and running, you set up an account with Google’s Webmaster Tools.

You can use it to:

• Monitor broken links
• See what keywords people are using to find you.
• See what sites google has found that are linking to you
• Submit a sitemap so Google can crawl your site
• and more…

Here is a great overview of using WebMaster tools.

How it can be used to help improve your SEO.

A video tutorial of how to add your site to Webmaster Tools.

However, if you are a PhotographyBlogSites user, we have made the process even easier. No editing code or downloading files. Just visit “Settings->All in one Webmaster” and give it your webmaster tools verification code and your done.