Previously, we posted about Choosing a Domain Name for an Artist Website. We stated the benefits of creating a internet address for artist bloggers and website owners. In this post, we gave several tips for creating a good custom domain, one that will be remembered and shared.
The next step, of course, is to register your internet address, but first let us explain in more detail the difference between custom domains and subdomains.
Subdomain
The word subdomain implies that your site is actually under a main domain. For the site modernartist.blogspot.com, the subdomain is modernartist, but the primary domain is blogspot. The same goes if a free site is hosted at Wordpress, Weebly, and other free website builders.
The main drawback of having a subdomain is that it looks very unprofessional for display of art. Art buyers and web surfers may not take the artist serious at all. There are millions of free websites online to compete with. If people always stay with the custom domain, the competition will never cease, but will only grow as more and more artists sign up for free web services.
With the custom domain, we will not be competing with these site owners, but be on a higher level. People who visit art sites with custom domains will be less likely to leave right away. The Google and Alexa ranking will grow faster because of this.
Custom Domain
This domain can be owned and purchased by you. If the owner in the previous example decided to redirect, their url would be www.modernartist.com (actually the redirected domain could be anything of their choosing, especially since this one isn’t available). The url of this blog was once artpromotivate.blogspot.com. It is still hosted at Blogger, but we chose a the custom domain name www.ArtProMotivate.com, and redirected our blog to this link. You may think this is complicated to setup, but is actually pretty simple. We will explain all the details of how you can do the same, in the next post.
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Visitors will actually be more likely to subscribe, share and bookmark artists websites on such social networks as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Stumbleupon. They will see that the artist takes their art serious enough to get a custom url. It is commonly known that self-hosted websites are more popular on the internet. With a custom domain on a free server, the site will appear to be just that… hosted by the artist.
There are many domain registrars online to purchase the new domain for an art site or blog. Of course, if you already have one, this can be redirected to your site. The domain only costs about $10 a year at Godaddy. Blogger and Wordpress also have their own custom domain service at about the same price, and so does Wix.
Next time, we will give you complete instructions on how to buy a custom domain name from Godaddy and Blogger, and redirect your free Blogger subdomain to a custom domain created by you.
UPDATE: You may find this post at Godaddy Domain Redirection - Blogger and Wordpress
Please let us know your opinions on this subject. If you need any specific help, please inform us of that as well.
Pavan @(pavanh)
ReplyDeleteHi ,
Thank you for a nice post , i started my blogging with subdomain and now i moved to custom domain i just wanted to ask you on moving from subdomain to custom , whatever backlinks which were achieved from subdomain will it be lost or redirected to custom domain
Waiting for your reply
Thank you
@Pavan DeshpandeHi Pavan,
ReplyDeleteBacklinks from subdomain will automaically redirect to your new custom domain.
pavan @()
ReplyDeleteHi Graham Matthews
Thank you for your response
and one more question , how long it takes to redirect the backlinks to custom domain ?
and it's almost 30days i switched to custom domains .
@Pavan Deshpande
ReplyDeleteThey already redirected. If you go to your old address in your browser, it will automatically bring you to your website.