Set Up Your Domain Through Bluehost

By Adam  |  29 Jun 2015 12:00:00

If you're thinking of setting up an eCommerce website, either as an extension of your existing business or as a wholly new project, then you may well be thinking of buying your own domain. Owning your domain is a good way to make your website look just a little bit more professional as not everybody will be dedicated to their business enough to purchase one. That's fair enough, because if you just have a rough idea for a business which you'd like to try and get started using the internet, it might be a bit foolhardy to buy a domain right away. A popular web hosting company is Bluehost, and in this blog post I am going to talk about how to use a Bluehost-purchased domain for your Sellr store, as well as a little on how to choose your domain name.

Choosing your domain name is quite an important decision because it impacts your business in two ways: first, if you have a domain that people may think sounds silly or unprofessional, then they might take your business less seriously and be less likely to use your services. Secondly, and more importantly, your domain name affects your search engine optimisation (SEO) which means that a good domain name will help more people to find your website, while a bad domain name will make it harder for people to find your website. How can you tell whether you've got a good or a bad domain name in mind? Well, a bad domain name might just be your name, or the name of your business, the kind of things that people are not likely to search for unless they are already familiar with you, a good domain name, meanwhile, might have the name of your business followed by a word or two on the product or service you provide. If your business name was Saver and you sold clothes at a cheap price, a good domain name would be www.SaverDiscountClothes.com, that way people looking simply for ‘discount clothes’ might find you.

Anyway, once you've purchased your domain through Bluehost, this is what you need to do next: You log in to your cPanel (at Bluehost) and then scroll down and click on 'DNS Zone Editor'. Once you've done that, click on the 'select a domain' drop down menu and select your newly purchased domain. Scroll down to 'Zone file records' and under 'A host' you'll see a table. Go to the 'CName Alias' section and click 'edit' on the 'www' row where you need to write in the current URL of your Sellr store. Once you do that, you're done on Bluehost and you just need to be sure you save it!

Now you have to head back to Sellr in order to initiate the last few steps. Once you're logged in click on the 'Website' tab and then on 'Website Domain Name' where you will find instructions as to what to do next. That should be fairly straightforward, but should you face any difficulty along the way, you can contact us over the phone on 01225 422200 or via email at support@sellr.com. We're more than happy to help!