Setting up your email address with Bluehost
Projecting a professional image online is about more than just a beautiful website. Offering visitors a way to get in touch is essential, but I’d advise steering clear of using a generic gmail, hotmail or AOL email address; it looks amateurish as a way of connecting with galleries and potential buyers. Much better to use your domain name. For DarenRedman.com we set up 2 email addresses: info@darenredman.com for general inquiries and daren@darenredman.com for personal responses from Daren herself. So let’s take a look at how we do this.
NOTE: This chapter assumes you have followed the tutorials in Section 2: Building your artist website, which means your site is hosted with Bluehost.
2. Click on ‘Email’ in the main navigation.
3. You will be taken to the ‘Email Accounts’ page where you can add email addresses for your website. In the ‘Email’ field, type in what you’d like the local part (or the unique part) of your email address to be. Common choices are ‘info’, ‘hello’, and ‘inquiries’, but you could also use your name or be a little more creative.
4. Next enter a password. Bluehost won’t allow a weak password, so you may need to try a few different versions before it is accepted.
5. Click on ‘Create Account’.
That’s all there is to creating your email address (you can simply repeat the process to add more email addresses to your domain). You can now direct visitors to get in touch via this email on your site and elsewhere. But how do you access the mail sent to this address?
Accessing your email
Option 1
1. Your first option is to log in to Bluehost and click on ‘Email’. Then scroll down, click on ‘More’ and click on ‘Access Webmail’.
2. You’ll then be asked for the password you created earlier.
3. You may be asked to log into Bluehost again. After that you’ll be taken to a screen that looks like this. There are 3 free services offered to access your email. I just use the first one (horde). Click on the logo.
4. You’ll then be taken to your inbox.
Option 2
Your second option is probably more convenient and allows you to access your email through Mac Mail or Outlook (or another email client).
1. Log in to Bluehost.
2. Click on ‘Email’.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on ‘More’. Next, click on ‘Configure Email Client’.
4. You’ll then be taken to a page that looks like this. Find your email client and choose whether you’d like to use an IMAP or a POP protocol. For an explanation of the difference between IMAP and POP click here.
5. In the pop-up window, click on ‘Proceed’. The script to automatically set up your email account on the chosen client will now be downloaded to your computer.
6. Find the downloaded file and double click on it.
7. In the pop-up window click ‘Run’.
You should now have a professional email address associated with the domain name for your artist website all set up and ready to use.
