Putting All the Pieces Together

Earlier, I posted why I created this blog and the associated parent site, aaronhickmann.com. I suppose it is also worthwhile to talk about how I put everything together. Since this is a personal site, I wanted to take the most cost effective route possible, but also not have to struggle with difficult tools. I do value what little free time I have so I didn't want to have to bang my head against the wall any more than necessary.

First step, register the domain. In this case, it's just my name and since it's pretty unique, it wasn't hard to get. I locked that puppy up for 10 years (with the help of a coupon found on the Internet) for about 75 bucks.

Next, get a site together. There are tons and tons of free hosting providers out there. I signed up for a couple before trying Google sites. For me, Google would be fine. If I were a business looking to perform ecommerce functions, I would probably look at something like SquareSpace.com. In any case, the next item was to choose from the panolpy of templates and then start building content. Cost for the site was $0.

It had been awhile since I had updated my resume or even thought about my public presentation. So there was quite a bit of editing and content creation required. Once, there was at least some fledgling content, I set the site  to public and then pointed the domain at it using the domain and sub-domain redirection tools. Tip: Make sure to create a sub-domain called www to point to your site as well, i.e. www.aaronhickmann.com since most people will type in the w's.

My plan is to leave most of the content on the site relatively static. I don't change up my career or personality that much, but I did want to have some dynamic content. So, I created a Blogger account which is where you are reading this and linked it to my web page so that there is a unified location to get my information.  In the content, I also linked to my Twitter account and my Linked In public profile.

This site has only been live for a short time, but it's always good to get a sense of who is visiting, why and what they are looking at. So, I signed up for and configured Google analytics so that I can get reports of the activity and how folks are finding me. Also, helpful to tweak your site content and (sort of) see how Google sees your site are the tools and articles at Google Webmasters. Both of these sites are free as well.

So far so good in terms of cost. Now I just need to keep the content flowing and we'll see how this grand experiment works out.