How to Setup a Custom Branded Email Address with Outlook (Office365)

Are you looking to set up a professional branded email address with Outlook.com? Microsoft’s Outlook premium allows you to use your own domain name to create a business email address. In this article, we will show you how to setup your custom branded email address with Outlook.com.

What is a Professional Branded Email Address?

A professional email is the one that has your business name in it. For example, support@yourdomain.com is a professional email address. Whereas yourdomain@yahoo.com is not a professional email address.

There are many ways you can create a professional email address. You can use the built-in mail server that comes with most WordPress hosting company. See our article on how to create a free business email address in five minutes.

This would work for most starter websites on a shoestring budget. However, it lacks several critical features like better spam and antivirus protection, enhanced security, easy account management, and more.

If you want the powerful features mentioned above, then you’ll need a professional business email service that works with your existing business name (aka domain name).

What is Outlook.com?

Outlook is an email service offered by Microsoft. You can create a free yourname@outlook.com account to use the service. However, if you want to create a professional branded email address with Outlook.com, then you will need to sign up for Office 365.

It is a paid service starting from $12.50 per user / month. It includes 1 TB of OneDrive storage, latest Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for your PC or Mac.

At WPBeginner, we use and recommend G Suite by Google for business email addresses because it’s more cost effective (starts at $5 / month). Also we prefer the Google Cloud since our team is familiar with Gmail and other Google Apps.

For more details, you can see our comparison of G Suite vs Office 365 to learn how it stacks up against Outlook.com.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to create a custom branded email address with Outlook.com.

Signing up for Outlook Premium with Office 365

First, you need to visit Office 365 website and sign up for their Business Premium subscription. It is the only subscription that includes support for custom domains.

You will be asked to provide personal information. After that, click on the next button to continue and enter your payment information.

After signing up, you will land on the Office 365 admin panel. From here you need to visit Setup » Domains page to add your custom domain.

This will bring you to the domains settings page. Go ahead and click on the ‘Add domain’ button to continue.

On the next screen, you will be asked to enter the domain name you want to setup. After entering the domain name, click on the next button to continue.

Office 365 will now look up your domain name and then ask you to verify ownership by adding information to your domain’s DNS settings.

To do this, you will need to switch back to your domain’s settings page. Depending on your domain registrar, this page will be located under your account. You need to find the DNS settings option.

If your domain is registered by your WordPress hosting company, then you will find the domain’s setting under your cPanel dashboard labeled as ‘Zone Editor’ or ‘DNS Zone Editor’.

Note: Above screenshot is from Bluehost. Your hosting screenshot may look slightly different.

When adding a DNS record, make sure that the information you enter matches the information displayed by Office 365.

Once you have pasted the DNS record, click on the ‘Add DNS record’ button to save your changes.

Next, you need to switch back to Microsoft Office 365 admin portal and click on the verify button.

Office 365 will now check for DNS record to verify that you own the domain name. DNS verification can take 5 – 10 minutes because sometimes your DNS is not updated right away.

After verification, you will be asked to manage your online services.

You will get two options here: the first is to automatically allow Office 365 to make required changes to your DNS settings, and the second option is to manually manage your DNS records.

If your domain is registered with GoDaddy, then you can select the first option and Office 365 will take care of the rest.

Otherwise, choose the second option to manually manage your DNS records.

Once you have made the selection, click on the next button to continue.

Office 365 will now ask you which service you want to configure. Right now we just want to setup Exchange to use the business email address service.

Click on the next button to continue.

Exchange needs three DNS records to work. You will be able to see them on the next screen.

Once again, you will need to go to your domain’s DNS settings page and add these records individually.

Here is what each of these DNS records does.

First, you have an MX record, which provides instruction on where to deliver the email messages. After that, you have a TXT record, which helps prevent someone from spoofing your email to send spam. Lastly, you have a CNAME record which let’s software like Outlook discover and connect to an email service.

Now if your website already had an MX record, then it would be replaced with this one. This makes sure that you can use Outlook’s mail servers to send and receive emails from your custom domain email address.

Once you have entered all DNS records, click on the verify button. Office 365 will now check your domain DNS settings. If everything is in the order, then you will be redirected back to the domains page.

You have successfully setup your domain name to work with Outlook.

You are now ready to create your custom domain email address using Outlook.com.

Adding Custom Branded Email Address in Outlook.com

From your Office 365 dashboard, go to Users » Active Users and then click on Add a user button.

On the next screen, you need to provide the user’s personal information and then choose an email address for them.

Next, click on the add button to save your settings.

You can now login using the email address and password you created in the earlier step to use your new professional branded email with Outlook.com.

You can also install Office 365 apps on your Mac and PC including Outlook. This will allow you to use your branded business email address with offline access via Outlook app.

We hope this article helped you learn how to set up a professional branded email address with Outlook. You may also want to see our article on how to how to set up a professional email address with G Suite and Gmail.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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Source: Wordpres

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18 Most Important Things You Need to Do After Installing WordPress

We are often asked by users about what to do right after starting a blog? Once you have installed WordPress, there are still quite a few things you need to do to properly setup and launch your website. In this article, we will share the most important things that you will immediately want to do after installing WordPress.

1. Add a Contact Form

All websites on the internet need a contact form. It allows your website visitors to quickly contact you by simply filling out a form on your website.

By default, WordPress does not come with a built-in contact form.

This is where WPForms comes in. It is the best WordPress contact form plugin and allows you to easily create beautiful contact forms for your website.

They also have a WPForms free version that you can download from WordPress.org plugin repository.

See our step by step guide on how to create a contact form in WordPress.

2. Change Site Title, Tagline, and Timezone

Next, you need to change the site title, tagline, and timezone settings. Simply head over to Settings » General page and change these settings.

3. Setup WordPress SEO

SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, is used by website owners to get more traffic from Google and other search engines.

WordPress is pretty SEO friendly out of the box. However, there is a lot more that you can do to optimize your SEO and get more traffic to your website.

The best time to set up your website’s SEO is right after installing WordPress.

We recommend using the Yoast SEO plugin. It is the most comprehensive WordPress SEO plugin on the market, and it takes care of all the important SEO settings out of the box.

For complete step by step instructions, see our ultimate WordPress SEO guide for beginners.

4. Install Google Analytics

As a website owner, you need to understand your audience, what they are looking for, and how you can help them find it. These insights help you make smarter decisions to grow your business.

This is where you need Google Analytics. It shows you how many people visit your website, where they came from, and what they did on your website.

The easiest way to install Google Analytics is by using MonsterInsights. It is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress and shows beautiful analytics reports right inside WordPress.

For the complete setup, see our beginner’s guide on how to easily install Google Analytics in WordPress.

5. Install Caching

Studies show that 1 second delay in page load time can lead to 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page views, and 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.

As a website owner, you need to make sure that your website is fast and performs well even under high traffic.

This is where caching comes in. It allows your website to quickly serve cached copies of your pages to users instead of generating them on the fly. This reduces server load on your website and improves your page load speed.

There are a lot of caching plugins available for WordPress, but we recommend using the WP Super Cache plugin. See our guide on how to install and setup WP Super Cache plugin for detailed instructions.

Caching alone can significantly improve your website’s speed. However, there are lots of other things you can do to make it faster. See our complete guide on how to improve WordPress speed & performance.

6. Setup Backups

Each year millions of dollars worth of damages are caused by data loss. Creating backups is the only way to make sure that you can easily recover your website in case of a disaster.

Some WordPress hosting companies offer limited backup services with their hosting plans. However, these backups are not guaranteed, and it is your responsibility to backup your website on your own.

Luckily, there are several great WordPress backup plugins that you can use to automatically create backups.

We recommend using Updraft Plus. It is the best WordPress backup plugin and allows you to setup automatic backup schedules. You can also store your backups securely on remote storage services like Google Drive, Amazone S3, Dropbox, and more.

For step by step instructions see our step by step tutorial on how to backup and restore WordPress using UpdraftPlus

7. Setup WordPress Security

WordPress is quite secure out of the box. However, you still need to follow security best practices to keep your website secure.

Some of these best practices are quite easy to do on your own like using strong passwords, securing WordPress admin area, and installing updates.

For other things, you will need a plugin. There are some great WordPress security plugins that you can use.

We recommend using Sucuri. They are the industry leader in website security, vulnerability scanning, and malware protection.

The best part about using Sucuri, is that they offer the best WordPress firewall plugin. A website firewall blocks suspicious traffic from ever reaching your website.

For complete instructions, follow the steps in our ultimate WordPress security guide for beginners.

8. Setup Spam Protection

Spam comments can be quite problematic. Most of them contain links to malicious websites known for distributing malware. Spam comments can affect your search rankings and your website’s reputation.

You can enable comment moderation in WordPress to prevent any comment appearing without approval. However, as the quantity of spam grows you will be spending considerable time moderating comments.

To fix this, you need to install and activate the Akismet plugin. It is a WordPress anti-spam plugin and one of the only two plugins that come pre-installed on every WordPress website.

To learn more, see our guide on how to setup Akismet anti-spam plugin in WordPress.

9. Delete Unused WordPress Themes

Most WordPress users will install and test a few themes before deciding on one that’s a keeper. Instead of leaving those unused themes installed, be sure to delete them. The reason for that is because even inactive themes will need updates.

We do recommend keeping at least one default theme installed. This theme will act as a fallback in case you have to to switch themes when troubleshooting for errors.

Go to Appearance » Themes page and click on an unused theme that you want to delete. This will bring up a popup showing theme details. In the bottom-right corner of the popup you will see the link to delete the theme.

Repeat the process to delete all unused themes.

10. Setup WordPress Comments

Comments play an important role on most blogs. They are a good indicator of user engagement and allow you to build a community around your blog.

Simply go to Settings » Discussion page to setup comments. From here you can enable or disable comments, setup comment notifications, and enable comment moderation.

11. Delete Default Content

WordPress comes with some default content to be used as the placeholder items. This includes a blog post titled ‘Hello World’, a sample comment, and a sample page.

Simply go to Posts » All Posts page. Take your mouse to the ‘Hello World’ post and then click on the ‘Trash’ link.

Next, go to Pages » All Pages page and then delete ‘Sample Page.

Lastly, visit the Comments page and then delete the default comment.

12. Setup a Default Category

WordPress posts are required to be filed under at least one category. By default, WordPress uses the ‘Uncategorized’ category as the default category. If you don’t change the category when writing a blog post, then it will automatically be filed under the default category.

To change the default category, first, you need to visit Posts » Categories page to create a new category. This will be used as your new default category.

After that, go to Settings » Writing page. Here you will see the default category option, you can go ahead and select the new category you created earlier.

Finally, you can go to Posts » Categories page and delete the ‘Uncategorized’ category.

To learn more, see our guide on how to change the default Uncategorized category in WordPress.

13. Setup Front and Blog Pages

By default WordPress displays your blog posts on the homepage. However, if you are making a small business website, then you would want to use a static page as your homepage.

Even most blogs want to use a static front page as their homepage. This allows them to create custom layouts for their homepage.

To set up these pages, you can simply go to Settings » Reading page and select the pages you want to use as your front page and blog page.

For more details, see our article on how to add a separate page for blog posts in WordPress.

14. Upload Your Gravatar

WordPress uses Gravatar to display user photos in author bios and in WordPress comments. Gravatar is a profile image hosting service that allows users to use the same photo as their profile image across millions of website.

Simply go to the Gravatar’s website and create an account using the email address you have used in your WordPress account.

After that, you can use this email address to comment on millions of websites using Gravatar including your own site.

For more details, see our article on how to use Gravatar in WordPress.

15. Complete Your User Profile

Next, you would want to complete your WordPress user profile. Simply head over to Users » Your Profile page to update your profile information.

By default, WordPress will use your username next to your blog posts and comments. You would want to replace it with your full name or nickname. See our article on how to add or change your full name in WordPress.

You would also want to provide your website link. Other plugins may also add their own custom fields to your user profile like social media links.

Lastly, enter a short bio of yourself. This would give your users a quick introduction and help them learn more about the author behind the articles.

16. Upload Favicon and Site Icon

Favicon or Site Icon is the tiny image that appears next to your website title in the browser. It helps your users identify your website and increases brand recognition among your most frequent visitors.

First, you will need to create an image of exactly 512×512 pixels in dimensions and save it in png, jpeg, or gif format.

After that, you need to visit Appearance » Customize and click on the ‘Site Identity’ tab. Under the ‘Site Icon’ section click on the ‘Select File’ button to upload your favicon.

For more details, see our article on how to add favicon and site icon in WordPress for step by step instructions.

17. Change WordPress Email Address

Most users add their own email address when installing WordPress. This means their first user profile and their website’s email address are the same.

To change this you can go to Settings » General page and enter the new email address you would like to use for the website.

Make sure that the new email address is active, as WordPress will send a confirmation email to that address.

You can use any email address here. However, it would be best to use an email address that shows that this address is for automated emails sent from your website.

If you want to use email accounts using your own domain name, then please see our guide on how to create a free business email address for your WordPress website.

18. Setup Your WordPress Theme

The next step is to setup your WordPress theme. Most WordPress themes come with different features and customization options. However, there are some basic settings that are the same in all WordPress themes. In fact, they are common among most websites on the planet.

Let’s start with setting up navigation menus. It is the links menu that usually appears in the header section. It contains links to different areas of your website.

For detailed instructions, see our beginner’s guide on setting up navigation menus in WordPress.

Next, you would want to add widgets to your WordPress. Widgets allow you to add different blocks to your website’s sidebar or widget ready areas.

By default, WordPress will display a few default widgets in your primary sidebar. You would want to rearrange them or add other widgets. Your theme may also come with its own custom widgets for social media and other features that you would want to use.

For detailed instructions, see our beginner’s guide on how to add and use widgets in WordPress

Your theme may also include plenty of other options like color schemes, layout choices, header styles, and more. Explore these options and set them up to your own liking.

We hope this article helped you learn things you will immediately want to do after installing WordPress. You may also want to see these actionable tips to drive traffic to your new WordPress site.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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Source: Wordpres

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Nokia 2 comes to UK with massive battery and an affordable price-tag

The entry-level member of HMD Global’s Android-powered Nokia revival is on its way to the UK. The Nokia 2, which launched in the US and India last November, will hit store shelves this month with an affordable £99 price-tag.

The Finnish OEM’s cheap-and-cheerful device will retail via Amazon, Argos, John Lewis, Tesco, Carphone Warehouse, and EE. HMD Global says the phone’s official launch is February 26th (via TechRadar), but Amazon’s listing currently says it will be released five days earlier on the 21st.

Editor’s Pick

The best Nokia phones you can get your hands on

Nokia was once the biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world but lost its appeal when it decided to overlook Android and start making Windows-powered smartphones. The company was sold to Microsoft in 2013, which decided …

Available in Black or White at launch, the 5-inch handset has a lot going for it despite its budget asking price.

First and foremost is the Nokia 2’s enormous 4,100 mAh battery which offers up to two days of juice on one charge.

As a general specs refresher, the Nokia 2 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 212 processor backed by 1 GB of RAM, 8 GB of storage (expandable), and is kitted out with an 8 MP main camera and a 5 MP front-facing camera.

Out-of-the-box the Nokia 2 runs Android Nougat, but HMD Global has promised that it will soon be updated directly to Android 8.1 Oreo – that’s right, it’ll skip straight over vanilla Oreo and go straight to the latest version.

You can pre-order the Nokia 2 at Amazon via the button below. Be sure to check out our hands-on impressions here.

Buy Now: Nokia 2 at Amazon UK

Source: Android Zone

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