Setup a Professional Branded Email Address with Outlook.com

How to Setup a Professional Branded Email Address with Outlook.com?

What is a Professional Email?

A professional email is the one that has your business name in it. For example support@yourdomain.com is a professional email rather having yourdomain@yahoo.com. There are many ways you can setup a professional email. You can use the built-in mail server that comes with most WordPress web hosting providers. But that does not nearly match up to the features you get with Gmail.

Step by Step Guide to Setting up Outlook.com on a Custom Domain Name

In order to use Outlook on your own custom domain, you need to configure your domain’s MX and TXT Records. MX records tell domain name servers that you are using Microsoft mail servers, and TXT records will be used to verify your ownership of the domain.

Step 1: Signing up for a Custom Domain Mail Service

Go to Windows Live Admin Center and click on Get Started to start setting up your domain on Outlook.com.

Enter your domain name on the next page:

Setup a Professional Branded Email Address with Outlook.com

The next screen will give you a choice to either use an existing Microsoft account to administer this domain or create a new Microsoft account on your own domain name, e.g. yourname@yourdomain.com. Make sure that you give an active email address as Microsoft will send a verification email to verify your ownership of the email address.

Setup a Professional Branded Email Address with Outlook.com

If you opted to use an existing Microsoft account then you will be asked to sign in, otherwise you will have to fill a form to set up a new account on your custom domain. Once you fill out the form, you will receive a verification email at the email address you provided. Click the link in the email to verify your ownership of the email account.

Setup a Professional Branded Email Address with Outlook.com

The next page will ask you to confirm your request and accept Microsoft’s terms of service. Once you accept, you have finished the first step of setting up an administrator email account to manage your domain on Outlook.com

Step 2: Setting up DNS MX Records to use Outlook.com

After the registration, you will reach Windows Live Admin Center’s domain control page and it will be showing MX and TXT record strings which you need to add to your DNS settings.

Many WordPress hosting providers use c panel for account management. It is likely that your web host may be using a different control panel with a slightly different interface. Don’t worry just look around for Domain Settings page, and you will find a link to edit the DNS settings or enter MX records. If you can’t find DNS or MX records settings in your control panel, then ask your web host. In this tutorial we will be using cpanel to demonstrate how to add MX records.

Log in to c-panel and click on MX Entry icon under Mail:

Setup a Professional Branded Email Address with Outlook.com

Select a domain name:

Setup a Professional Branded Email Address with Outlook.com

After this you need to select email routing method. Choose “Automatically detect configuration”.

Setup a Professional Branded Email Address with Outlook.com

Add the MX record string provided by Outlook.com. Leave priority as it is and add the record in the Destination field.

Setup a Professional Branded Email Address with Outlook.com

To protect email originating from your domain and landing into junk or spam, you need to configure sender ID by adding a TXT record with this value:

v=spf1 include:hotmail.com ~all

If you want users to use mail.yourdomain.com to sign in for email address, then you can create a CNAME record in your domain’s custom DNS settings or in cpanel’s Simple DNS Editor. Enter Mail in the Name field, and enter subdomain in CNAME field, e.g. mail.example.com.

Setup a Professional Branded Email Address with Outlook.com

You will have to wait for DNS settings to propagate which can take 30 minutes to 48 hours. You can refresh Windows Live Admin center’s domain settings page to see when the changes are live and ready.

Setup a Professional Branded Email Address with Outlook.com

Also see Add the Facebook “Like” Button to Blogger or WordPress

Step 3: Creating Custom Domain Name Email Accounts

Go to Windows Live Admin Center and click on your active domain. On the left sidebar you will find options to manage accounts on your domain. You can choose Open Membership, so that people on your site can signup for an email account with your domain name. The other option is where you manually create email accounts for your staff, family members, friends or community members. You have the power to suspend or delete any email account on your domain at any time.

Setup a Professional Branded Email Address with Outlook.com

Reduce Your Blog/Website Loading Time

Reduce Your Blog/Website Loading Time

How To Check Speed Of Your Blog?

There are many tools to check the speed of the blog or website but Google Speed Test Tool is the best tool which I recommend to all bloggers.

• Go To Google Speed Test Tool.
• Enter the website url and check the speed.
• We scored 90 out of 100 which I feel is not a great score,we are still working on improving the speed of our blog.If you scored anywhere between 80 to 90 then you should take this seriously and work cutting down the extra scripts,images,flashes etc.

Tips To Reduce The Blog Loading Time: 

1.Compress Images before you Upload:

This is the one of the most important factor when coming to blog loading time.Most of the newbies upload the images without compressing them thereby loosing a great way to reduce the blog loading time.Wordpress users can straight away use plugins like Smushit to compress images as soon as they upload image to text editor.Blogspot users have to use a third party service to compress images before uploading them.I personally recommend you to use Yahoo Smushit and Puny Pny.

2.Resize and Give Proper Dimensions to Images:

After you finish selecting images for the post that you are going to publish ,you have to properly resize the image.Use Cropp.me to resize images online.Give proper dimensions to fit images in the body of the post.

3.Avoid Too Many Javascripts/Flashes/Plugins:

Remove unwanted Java scripts,Flashes and Plugins.More the number of Javascripts and Plugins more will be the blog loading time.In case of wordpress users prefer manual coding than using ready made plugins as the plugins will increase your blog loading time.

4.Decrease The Number Of Social Share Buttons:

Now again these social sharing buttons are javascripts hosted by third party servers ,so it takes some time to load thereby increasing your blog loading time.Reduce the usage of social sharing buttons on blog.If your major traffic comes from search engines then use very less social sharing buttons.

5.Don’t Use Image Background:

Few people use image background for their blogs.If you are one of them then kindly remove the image and keep a simple background.A background Image repeats itself horizontally and vertically which is responsible for 50% slow load time. Just remove the background image and feel the difference. To remove a background image simply find this CSS code inside your template.

6.Show Not More Than 5 Posts Per Page:

More the number of posts per page more the time taken for loading.Don’t use too many or too less posts per page.5 posts per page will give a good user experience.

7.Reduce Advertisements:

Advertisement banners are coded with Javascripts which reduces the loading time of the blog.Use only reliable Advertising networks like Google Adsense, Infolinks, Buy Sell Ads etc.Few networks like Adbrite,Technorati Media have a good payout but effects blog loading time a lot.Try to place ads below the fold to increase blog loading time.

8.Avoid Linking To Blog Directories:

Linking to blog directories not only reduces the loading time of blog but also Google will penalise such blogs with links in the footer(Google Penguin and Panda).

9.Reduce External Linking:

External linking especially using banner images or scripts provided by third party services increases the blog loading time.Always host the images on your own server.Blogspot users create a static page to upload images to use on your blog.

10.Wordpress Users Use WP Super Cache Plugin:

WP super cache wordpress plugin is one such plugin which helps you optimizing your database by generating static HTML pages.This way when any page is requested from your blog, static page will be served instead of processing all PHP scripts thereby reducing the blog loading time.

Source : Techiego.com