Transitional Steps
While you are Getting Started, transitional steps may be useful:
Redirect
- If you're currently publishing most of your textual content on a silo, then create a redirect from your personal domain to that silo profile
A redirect still has the disadvantage though that when people click on your URLs with your personal domain name, their browser will redirect them (and show them) the hosting service URL (e.g. user-example.tumblr.com rather than user-example.com), thus if they reshare this URL by copy/pasting they won't be using your personal domain.
Custom Domain Silo
Better than a redirect:
- Setup an account on a silo that allows custom domains like Tumblr
- See webhosting#Custom_domain_silos for the current list.
This will:
- help you easily get started with publishing content publicly on the web
- allow you to share URLs with your personal domain serve the content you publish. This is better than simply sharing URLs directly to those hosted services because in the future you can set up your site to serve those URLs directly rather than having them handled by a hosted service.
Hosted CMS Software as Service
Better than a redirect and custom domain silos (though fairly similar in functionality) are services like WordPress.com or Known, which for small and very reasonable fees will allow you to more quickly get set up and allow some flexibility. Many of these services provide data export to move to more customizable projects later.
- See webhosting#Hosted_CMS_Software_as_Service for the current list as well as additional pros/cons.
Projects
Better than a silo or redirect, but requiring some additional configuration, one could download, install, and configure one of the various available projects.
If you have the technical expertise, why not start your own project?