My website was one of the first things that I built for my practice. I had done a little web design in high school and college, so I had experience in creating some simple websites, so I figured I could save a little money and also have a more intimate relationship with what is going to become my main focus of marketing.

The first thing that I did was to sign up for retinaoc.com, through google apps for your domain. Alot of us probably use Gmail, and Google Apps basically provides the backend with your own domain name. Google makes it pretty straight forward to buy a domain and set up your basic apps.

One caveat though, when I signed up, Google Apps was still free for the first 10 employees. It’s now a paid service, I think at something around $10/per user/year. Honestly, it is likely still worth it as its email system provides you and your employees an almost instantly familiar interface.

They gave you the choice of registering with one of two domain name registrars, eNom and goDaddy. I chose eNom in part because I don’t like goDaddy for multiple reasons, but I won’t go into that here. Once you are done, you own your name, for at least one year.

The next thing I did was search around for hosting providers. Again I avoided goDaddy like the plague, and I went with Dreamhost. Honestly, this was for good reviews I saw on line, but more importantly, I found a deal for 2.95/month for the first year. Seemed like too good a deal to leave on the table. Also, lifehacker gave it a great review this year. Aside from a few outages this year, I’m pretty satisfied.

http://lifehacker.com/5911651/five-best-web-hosting-companies

Dreamhost obviously has alot of people coming from Google Apps, because they have the ability to automatically integrate the two. Once your mail addresses point towards Google, and everything else to Dreamhost, the rest is creative.

I decided to use WordPress to build my website. Another part of choosing Dreamhost, is that their accounts came with WordPress already installed. I had heard good things about WordPress to manage websites, but I had no experience working with it. Luckily, I learned about themeforest.com. They have many different themes that you can try out and buy and install onto your site. I used a theme called Dandelion, which provides a very clean interface. The rest took a little HTML knowledge, but it could easily be done without HTML just using the WordPress editing system.

I’m happy to help anyone else that wants to DIY your website, and I feel like it’s well worth the effort. I’ve added wikipedia articles for certain eye diseases, the ability to make an appointment completely online, and a forms library to allow patients to download consents at their convenience. Most of these things I added on in a piecemeal fashion when I thought about it.

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