Using Namecheap and Free Hosting with Google Sites
- Purchase a domain from namecheap
- Set the price range to under $50 per year, hide unavailable, and select all Top Level Domains.
- Register a free account with Cloudflare and your new domain
- Cloudflare will give you new “DNS Nameservers” to enter into the site records in Namecheap. This will allow Cloudflare to take over the handling of your website routing, which makes things much faster and will make it easier to add other services to your website in the future.
- Create a new Google account at mynewwebsite@gmail.com
- OR create a new Google Workspace account at me@mynewwebsite.whatever. Creating a Workspace account will provide you will an email address and the more advanced version of all of their business apps for $12.00 per month.
- Create your draft portfolio in Google Sites
- Make a basic “Landing Page” that says who you are.
- Connect your site in Google Sites to your custom domain by adding the required information into Cloudflare.
- The steps that you will need to take here depends on whether or not you have a free Gmail account or a paid Workspace account. In either case, the instructions are a tad bit complicated, but Google walks you through them. In either case, it will involve manually entering the same DNS records into your Cloudflare account, then clicking through some settings in Google sites.
- After you have followed those steps, it will take anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 days for the internet to learn how to find your website. During that time, your site may show security errors. This is one of the reasons for using Cloudflare as an intermediary, as if you took that step, it should be closer to the 20 minute mark.
- While you are waiting for those setting to populate, build out your portfolio a bit more.
- Add a Frequently Asked Questions page.
- Write a bio and story about you. Add pictures.
- Add a payment methods page or “Menu” page.
- Add a “How to become a client” section and link it to an embedded form where they can submit information.
- When a client approaches you ANYWHERE about ANYTHING, you should be able to just refer them to yourwebsite.whatever.
