Website drama in NE Scotland

I've just joined Clickbank as an affiliate marketer, 'cos I think there should be good money to be made if I can get the hang of it, plus it's a useful way of honing my marketing skills.

Having found a product I thought would sell well (and that I'm happy to sell), I had to set up a website for it. What a palaver! I tried GoDaddy, and found a name that worked with the keyword research I'd done. Then I tried to buy it and was instantly reeling among all the other bits and bobs they tried to sell me - without any explanation of what they all did.

Did I need hosting? How many pages did I want to buy? For how many months? Did I need help building the site? Would I need to know HTML to be able to use their website set-up program? And so on... and on... and every time I got to the checkout there were more options. I got totally betwattled, and went elsewhere. (Memo to self: yes, it can be a good idea to offer "people who bought that also bought this" suggestions at the checkout - but not to the extent that the potential customer leaves to protect her sanity.)

I already operate a website (greatcopy.info) via MS Office Live. It was really simple to set up and required no knowledge of HTML. If you have one yourself, please read the next bit really carefully.

I thought I'd try putting my new domain on my MSOL account.

Big mistake. You can only operate one domain per account (you only find that out after you've done it, unless you spend your time reading the posts from people who've tried it before - and you're hardly going to do that if you haven't encountered the problem yourself, are you? Why don't they tell you when you start looking for new domain names?!?!?).

Anyway, I set up a new account and then looked for ways of transferring the new domain to it. You can't do that either. Oh, and it's not called transferring (too obvious: transferring means moving a domain from one host to another), it's called re-delegating. (Re-delegating?!?!? I didn't know I'd delegated it before.) Who comes up with these terms????? Do they speak English, or do they dream in techno-babble?

OK, so how do I re-delegate it, then? It seems MSOL domains come from a company in Australia, and what you have to do is so complicated my head's still swirling - it involved 6 emails, 2 phone calls to Australia to try and speed up the process, and most of the day to accomplish. And the domain is still "pending" on the new account, so I shan't be able to do anything with it for 24 hours.

What a waste of time (so far 3 entire days have been spent on this farrago)! Why can't they just have a simple button that says "I want to move this domain from one of my accounts to another"? Or better still, just allow you to operate two domains within the same account? It can't be beyond the wit of software to recognise that there are two domains needing to be billed. Or three... or four... Just as well I started with plenty of hair.

Next time I try this, I may even go through an expert. I didn't this time because I thought it would be quicker (and cheaper) to buy "off the shelf" and I don't need any bells or whistles. But given the hassle factor and the time it's wasted, I'm not sure it was either cheaper or quicker. Still, I guess it's all part of life's rich pattern and I've learnt something from the whole process: just 'cos you've done something once, doesn't mean it's going to be straightforward the second time!

If you want to have a look at the site (give me a couple of days!) it's www.BloggingForProfitToday.com Just thought I'd mention it...