Visitors cannot find my site

How do you suggest people find your site? A site address is really no different to a postal address. If you know it, you either just write it on the front of the envelope or you have to look it up in a directory first.

Similarly, visitors to your site are either going to find it via a link on another site, via a search engine or by typing in the site’s url. If they do type it in, most browsers will happily just accept example.com rather than the whole https://www etc (assuming your site is located at the root of your domain).

How do I set the web address so that people can find my website without typing https://www…blah, blah, blah?

Ummm… may be we did not understand the problem correctly, but how do you open Google, facebook, twitter, ebay websites?

What is happening is that I am hosting my www.ads-software.com blog on my own domain. Currently, I am not publicising it because I want to build up some reading material first. I have, however, told several friends and they have all had Error 404 messages come back at them. To get around this, I have copy/pasted the url from the blog and texted or emailed them. That seems to work.

What I would like to achieve know is whether they must always type the full address, that is: https://www.philipmcdonnell.com/brokenbonds/ (which seems to be the only way they can get to my site) or is there a way to lose the https://www. part.

I am assuming it is my lack of knowledge around terminology within the www.ads-software.com settings section that is causing me the problem.

Any guidance will be much appreciated.

Currently, I am not publicising it because I want to build up some reading material first.

Well, that explains why Joe Public would have problems accessing your site – which is just the way you want it atm, yes?

they have all had Error 404 messages come back at them

My guess is that this is just because it’s such a long url right now and they are mis-typing it.

is there a way to lose the https://www. part.

Yes. Your hosts may be able to handle this for you. Try asking them. If not, you can add something to your root .htaccess file that will redirect www calls to the bare domain name or vice versa.

To be perfectly honest, I think this is all something that can be left until you are ready to launch the site publically. For a start, you could get rid of the brokenbonds part by allowing WordPress to take over the root domain relatively easily when you are ready to launch.

Thanks Esmi,

Yes, I want the blog available to people I know at the moment rather than all of Joe Public but that will change in a couple of months if everything goes to plan.

I have deliberately put my blog into a directory so that I can keep the rest of my domain free for other things I do that I have yet to build a site for.

I suspect, for the moment, I need to have the main domain reroute to the WP directory as that is all that’s there. Not being that confident with coding yet, I will approach my host to do the work for me when the time comes.

Again, many thanks.

You’re very welcome. Any further questions or problems, please feel free to post a new topic.

Best of luck with the new site. ??