Last Spring, after many hours of brain storming and asking everyone I know for input, I finally came up with a name for my business; The Dinner Belle. I love the double entendre, the logo options, the french aspect, everything. Perfect. In a late night panic about 2 weeks later I say to my husband, Scott,” I need to secure a domain name.” He heads to the computer and does a search. Hmm, Thedinnerbelle.com,net,org and everything else is taken by someone in Virginia. What can I be? Hmm, more brainstorming.

“I’m exhausted” Scott announces and heads to bed. I’m on my own. I sign up for Thedinnerbellepc.com and head upstairs too.

Next morning:

Scott – ” What did you come up with?”

me – “Thedinnerbellepc.com”

Scott ” personal computer?”

me – glare

Scott “what?”

me –  “We didn’t spend 20K on culinary school for me to be a personal computer”

Scott” Well, that’s what it makes me think of.”

me- ” shit.”

He heads off to work and I sign up hastily for Thedinnerbellechef.com. or so I think…

Fast forward 3 months and I’m sitting in the basement of my friend Melissa’s house and she’s trying to teach me some things about how to work WordPress. She’s going on about widgets, twitter, feedburner. Wow. I’ve been a stay at home mom for 10 years. I can tell you everything you need to know about the 0-10 set but I am so far behind on networking strategies, it’s scary.

First problem we discover is that I am on wordpress.com not .org which apparently are two different things and .org is much better and gives you more options. ” So I have to switch?” “It’s easy.”She assures me. “Do you have a domain name?”

“I do!” I say. I quickly do a search and find nothing. Hmm. Let me look in my email for the confirmation. I search. Ahh, there it is. Thedinerbelle.com. What? DINER? Holy shit, I spelled it wrong!

” Melissa, I’ve got to go figure this out.” I say dejected and leave with my tail between my legs.

At home, back on GoDaddy. I buy Thedinnerbellechef.com and throw in .me to boot. $50 more dollars. 4 domain names and $100 later. I’m on the wrong wordpress and still don’t have my website up. Ugh.