Apparently, there are not a lot of D.N. Meinsters out there. Or at least there are none that registered their own website, for I am now the owner of dnmeinster.com. You may even be reading this on my website right now, since I’ve been cross-posting between there and Tumblr.
After reading about where to buy my domain, mainly here, I decided to go with Namecheap over GoDaddy. It’s a bit more money than GoDaddy, at least for the first year, but there is much less objectionable about them. Their vague support of SOPA years ago left a bitter taste in my mouth, and I don’t want to have to make transfers when something similar happens in the future. It shouldn’t surprise you that politics was a driving force in this decision. Remember, political science degree.
Buying the domain was probably the easiest part. Next comes setting up a website. To keep it convenient, I decided not to host the site myself, but to use a free service. You got me. It’s mainly about money. If you’re hosting your own site on a server, you’ve got to be concerned with security, file storage, web traffic, etc. Using a third party IS convenient.
I was considering directing dnmeinster.com to either a Blogger page or a WordPress page, so I reserved both and started playing around with them. Suffice to say, if you want an actual website, WordPress is the way to go. Blogger is strictly about blogging, as far as I can tell. And its templates are very limited. WordPress.com has free templates and paid templates, meant for fully functional websites. With a small fee, dnmeinster.com became the site I designed on WordPress.com. Go and explore.
WordPress.com does offer paid versions of their service, which include more storage and stuff like that. One day I might upgrade. Maybe I’ll even buy a template. So far I am satisfied with my choice, in spite of some limitations with my current template. We’ll see how it goes.
D. N. Meinster 