I already wrote about starting sleazine.com – a music review zine and blog.
I’m not trying to sell anyone anything but sometimes these posts really help people and I’m not gatekeeping information. I do come from the tech space and have been building websites for myself and professionally for well over a decade now so I understand why this is so intimidating to the average person.
I promise – it’s not that hard – and you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars building your own website. I did add custom code for styling on my sites – you don’t need to do that! You can do it! You can save money! You can build a cool site and get off the tech oligarchs platforms and own it yourself.
- Register domain – I use namecheap.com, but people argue about the best providers. Namecheap has reasonable prices on web hosting though and I use their shared hosting platform for MANY domains at a very reasonable rate each year. Under 100$ for the hosting and the domains are all under 20$ a year typically. If any site is trying to sell you 500$ packages – be skeptical.
- I think I immediately drew Sylus after I thought of this idea. The Sleazine slug was part of the original concept. He’s been there since day 1 with his googly eyes. I drew him on my tablet in sketchbook pro. My tablet is a cruddy samsung s6 lite that’s about 5 years old – but who cares – it gets the job done when I need it.
- I get a free SSL cert for a year with namecheap with a new domain, but typically just install my own security certs every few months… it’s not that hard… You can find guides on this – but you go to cpanel – SSL certs – and paste in your secret and token and that’s about it. There’s many sites providing free encryption certs now and they are fine. You don’t need to spend a huge amount (if any) on SSL certs.
- Install WordPress – and don’t forget to save your username and password in a password manager. USE VERY LONG USERNAMES. This is your best protection against the obnoxious bots on the web. There’s antispam tools to help protect your wordpress admin login as well.
- Install Generate Press theme once you are in wordpress under customize (I’ve been using this one for years – it’s the best). I don’t pay much every year for it, something like 35$ and can use it on multiple sites. This is where you can use a free theme if you want – go explore. Do what you will. I just prefer generate press – it’s super customizable. It’s basically a builder but it comes in pretty blank and generic.
- Install a pre-built styling theme if you are lazy like me and don’t want to set every single content area up manually. I don’t even remember what theme I used. Something like ‘volume’ – totally optional but I liked the color schemes on it. I ended up changing the fonts and things around A LOT.
- I already made my zine directory out of google forms and sheets years ago and decided to throw that on it’s own page. It’s been wrapped in custom HTML and javascript styling and validation but it looks DAMN GOOD in my opinion.
- I created another google form for people to submit album review requests which I also wrapped in custom styling on it’s own page.
- I actually went and signed up for a virtual mailbox – this is farther than I’ve ever gone with any other site I’ve built. Why did I do this? Because it’s illegal to create a mailing list without providing a real address. I avoided it for a long time because of the legal rules and not wanting to use my home address. PO boxes are so expensive too – this covers that.
- I built up the mailerlite free service for my email list. This is all new to me but is setup – and working right!
- Now comes the part I’ve really never gotten into – my web store. I’ve already pretty much settled on SureCart for what I need.
- I’m selling zines so I need single physical item sales BUT I also want single digital sales as well.
- I also want to sell subscriptions to my zine as well.
I’ll come back and update this post after I think on this some more.
There’s a LOT of opinions on selling on your own site versus selling on ebay, or etsy, or whatever. I definitely will not be using shopify…. and I don’t have a lot of lot for selling on other platforms.
I think I want to get my site setup and running before I start adding zines to etsy and other places that take a huge cut of my profits. I’ll probably actually sell them for more money there to prevent losses. I’ll still be ‘marketing’ myself by being on those platforms though.
