Website Blog CMSs For Custom Domains

A new goal for my GwG Udacity Challenge Scholarship for Beginner Front-End Web Dev:

Figure out a couple good options for blog CMSs (content management systems) on basic-but-not-awful low-cost websites with custom domains. Figure out how to set those up and how to set up custom-domain email addresses, practice on a few different URLs, then write down all steps in the procedure so we can do it quickly and correctly in the future.

The reason for this new goal is that for a low-cost "website for a side project," we're using a domain someone has had registered for many years, fullybuzzed.com, and we want to do a blog "on" fullybuzzed.com. Since none of us working on the side project are highly-skilled web devs, and since we're on a nearly non-existent budget, we're initially just using Blogger, pointing it at fullybuzzed.com, and adding a couple static pages to the blog page. That should give us pretty much what we want for early days on the side project.

Slight problem. The three of us working on setting up the fullybuzzed.com web presence, blog, email, etc, have pretty close to zero experience pointing a Blogger account at a custom domain, using a free Gmail account to point to a specific fullybuzzed.com email address, or a few other back-office kind of things. So we've got things working somewhat, but not smoothly, and not the way I think it
should work.

For example, I created a static page for Events on the Blogger site. When you access the Events page directly with the blogspot.com URL, everything works fine. I can send someone this link, https://thehivefullybuzzed.blogspot.com/p/events.html, per the screenshot graphic to the right, and that link will take them to the Events page, just like it should.

BUT, things only sort of work when I want to access the Events page through fullybuzzed.com. If you type in http://fullybuzzed.com/, you go the Blogger website, which is all good. AND, when you click on the Events tab in the navigation bar on fullybuzzed.com, it brings up the Events page, which is a good thing. UNFORTUNATELY, you can't send someone a fullybuzzed.com link to the Events page, because the way things work as of the writing of this post, the Events page when accessed through the fullybuzzed domain only shows http://fullybuzzed.com/ in the URL bar, per the graphic to the left. Every blog post and every static page on the blog shows http://fullybuzzed.com/ as its address. We're hoping the re-direct is just incorrectly set up, and the person who has the domain fullybuzzed.com registered is supposed to work on figuring that out and fixing it tomorrow.

It shouldn't be this hard, though. Especially not for three people who've played with technology, and enjoyed it, for quite a few years.

So that's my added goal for this GwG class -- getting skilled at quickly setting up a low-cost website with the custom-domain email address I want and an easy-to-use blog CMS that has the expected custom-domain URLs for various pages on the site.

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