Although the question in the title may seem trivial, it takes a little bit of work to start in your own food & cooking website. The process consists of several elements that when completed properly can help you not only start up your own food blog & online cookbook website but also grow and expand quickly.
Steps To Start Food Website Quickly
Let’s start from the most obvious things that you may already know. However I am going to shed a bit more light on it for those who aren’t familiar with the process of establishing website yet.
Buying The Right Domain Name
If you have been doing research about food blogging you have probably seen this step and more or less you realize that you should start with choosing the domain name for your food website. You have pretty simplified choice here:
- focus on the brand name and try to be unique
- focus on the keyword / keyphrase related to food, eating, foodies, recipes, you get it..
Few years ago to start with I would suggest the second option where as it would work in relation to performance in search engines result page. In conjunction with good SEO strategy that would work quickly and efficiently. Sorry to say this, but these times are over… well not necessary but most of the domains that include food related keyphrases are already taken and it takes more effort to make good use of that.
So the choice boils down to the brand / nickname related domain name. Good. I am sure you have something in mind already but please remember to look at the wholepicture rather than domain name only. I mean, please think about other elements of the website, marketing strategy that could be implemented, logo, ID, banners, social media profiles, etc. So make sure the name you will come up with will be:
- possibly short and / or
- easy to remember
- catchy
- somehow related to food / eating
- embraces your concept / niche
Where to register your domain?
Well, it doesn’t matter really. But you may wan’t to register it alongside with the hosting package. Here are some of the providers:
These days you may often register your domain for free, when purchased with the hosting account.
Buy A Hosting Package
Let’s presume you know the domain name you want to register for your new, shiny food website and you will also need some place where you are going to hold your files & database. I am not taking a scenario for static blog here for consideration or food blogs run on the free platforms such as blogger or tumbler. We are thinking about professional approach with full control. Believe me, it is not so hard to get this going, at all. So coming back to the hosting – you can register your hosting with let’s say GoDaddy and you can even register your domain for free for a 1st year. How cool is that.
What hosting package you will need for a foodie website?
This is pretty important question here. As if you want to jump start you can’t take the cheapest package and expect superb performance from your website. With the cheapest package it will slow you down, will be slow for users and within few weeks (if not days) you will hit your resource limits.
So generally start at least from the medium packages that give you enough CPU, storage, transfer, etc. If you are not sure what are these, please feel free to ask.
So start with the medium to higher package and you will notice a difference. Of course there is no need to go for VPS (Virtual Private Server) or Dedicated Server solution as it would be overkill for a start, at least to the moment when you gain your visitors.
Configuring The Server – Hosting Panel
Recently I have noticed these trend that many ‘overnight’ developers try to make money on the basic things such as setting up cPanel or installing WordPress. Nothing bad in making money but there should be some limits especially when things are that easy. Of course we at Theme Bullet charge reasonable fee for setting up WordPress & installing the theme but only for the work that needs to be done personally. Well, I’ll hit this topic another time, now let’s get back to the traffic.
On many occasions when you receive your welcome email from your host (hosting provider) you will also receive login details. Some of the companies require to setup cPanel (one of the hosting control panels), i.e. GoDaddy and some of them will have your cPanel ready for your. Of course you may meet other hosting panels such as WHMCS or DirectAdmin or custom hosting panels (BlueHost). Generally in most of these cases hosting providers will have software installers ready to use. One of the popular options is Softaculous – it’s pretty intuitive. So login to your hosting panel and select WordPress and install it on your domain. If you bought domain already somewhere else you may also need to change nameservers (DNS) to point to your hosting details. You can check nameservers in the DNS Zones withing the control panel.
Install WordPress CMS
Anyway, don’t want to make it more complicated than it really is. In case you don’t feel the difference yet, WordPress comes in 2 flavours – WordPress.com (free preinstalled with paid extra features) with limited features and WordPress.org where you can download the CMS and use it on your server (commonly called self-hosted version). We will need the self-hosted WordPress.org version so we will have full control in the future.
So just go to your cPanel and install WordPress through software installer. Install it on your domain. It is quite intuitive process and shouldn’t take you more than couple of minutes. Just follow the guidelines in the installer.
Food & RecipesWordPress Theme Installation
Naturally you will option to use one of the free themes – you should be able to find quite a lot of them. Not many of them are really professional, optimized or embracing the food topic well enough. You may use basic themes alongside with some plugins or you can use foody templates where you won’t get custom fields and not everything will be included to start effectively.
I would suggest the option where you go for premium food WordPress theme that comes with integrated basic features. You can search from individual template vendors or purchase it through the marketplace. Costs may vary from $25 to even $125 for the theme. Please bear in mind that some of the themes require extra framework, i.e. Genesis. This means that you need to cover an additional cost of $59.95 for the framework. So think before you buy. Genesis gives you some flexibility when it is up to customization but these days many theme developers include their own frameworks that are equally good if not better and optimized for better performance.
Just so you know our Food Factory theme is highly customizable and powerful theme, that allows you to decide about many website elements:
- background images & colors
- font size & family, font colors
- layout options
- custom posts & post format support
- social sharing & networking
- SEO
- widgets ready
- more
Generally it has lots of features that allow you to jump-start with your Food Blog / Food & Recipes Website.
It turned out that this post is longer than I intended so I am going to finish it for now and continue in the next part as there are lot more things to cover. Please comment and share if you like it. You can also reach us out on social media, mostly on Twitter & Google Plus.
