With a Blog like WordPress …

Once of the best shortcuts you can take at this point is to use a Blog (like WordPress). This is a lot more simpler and quicker than trying to setup a site. If select a hosting provider like Hostgator, you can setup a wordpress blog with a few simple clicks , and it won’t take more than 3 minutes.

Once you’ve done this the next step is to find a nice blog theme from thousands of themes available for free at http://themes.wordpress.net/
once you have done the above now it’s a simple matter of logging in to your blog to post content.
As and when you post, wordpress will ping and alert the search engines to visit your site. This is automatic promotion for your site, which helps the blog to get indexed in search engines like google in quick time, faster than a simple website would get listed in Google.
All this is easy, and hassle free !

With a web site …

you have to go through the hassle of either building the site or paying some one to build a site.
The steps involved are

1. Find a developer
2. Specify the requirements
3. pay them (on some projects I am still waiting for the product to be delivered.)
4. wait for the initial design
5. etc…

So my recommendation is go for a blog and simplify your online journey.

Information given here will be useful to shortcut this long process and make a quick decision to get your on line journey started pretty quickly.

Some of the questions you have to answer are

1. Where to buy the domain name from ?

There are many options, I spent quite a lot of time researching different registrars (people who register domain names for you).

The main choices are Godaddy (godaddy.com) vs Local Registrars. I would higly recommend going with godaddy. They give a very user friendly control panel. It’s very easy to setup and maintain your domains. In my case I had to learn the hard way that this was the cheapest and easiest option.

The other option is to buy your domain from a local registrar, these are resellers. They buy domains from big companies like godaddy and sell us. This is more expensive as well as troublesome.

I tried both options and ended up using godaddy as the main registrar for all my domains. The local company I bought domains from was a big pain. No support, they kept changing there server IPs all the time so that I had to keep track of their changes and change my email settings etc…. They are also more expensive than godaddy. Once I decided that I’ve had enough with this local company it cost me more money and time to transfer my domain to godaddy.

2.Discounts ?

There are quite a few coupon codes that you can use with godaddy. Just search for “godaddy discount coupon” (http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=godaddy+discount+coupon)

3.Which name to buy ?

The domain name you choose is very important for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on your site. So select a name relavent to what your site is going to be about. For example if its about cats, make sure the “cat” keyword is part of your domain name. You can get quite a bit of traffic that way simply because people are searching for these keywords. So how do you find a great domain name ? Well you can brainstorm all day ! Or you can simply use these tools and just enter your keywords.
1.Domain Suggestions http://domain-suggestions.domaintools.com/

you will be given a long list of domain names to select.