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The
A-B-Cs of Websites
So you think you want a website?
Assuming you’ve already decided why you want a website and what
you would like the website to do for you, we can get started.
However, these first two seemingly simple questions usually result
in a painful expression of those I’ve asked.
Question #1
– Why do you want a website? Are
you selling a product or service? Are
you providing information? As
simple as this seems it is important to begin to focus on what exactly you
want to do.
Question #2
– What do you want your website to do for you? Is the site a form of advertising? Will you actually sell tangible products from the website?
Will you offer information to lessen the need for phone calls and
faxes? Are you doing this
because “everyone else” has website?
After you sit back and think this
over for a few minutes we can pick up with the basics of starting a
website.
Step #1 – You need a
DOMAIN NAME. A domain name is the name by which your website is found on
the internet. This is the
DOT-COM that you may have heard about.
While I could bore you with
various options and “free” services for getting a form of a domain
name, the bottom line is that if you want a professional website you
should have your own domain name. While
many names are taken there are still lots of choices for a domain name.
Obviously a domain name should be
related to you, your business or the purpose of your website.
If you run a business called Mary’s Boutique your first
domain name choice might be www.marysboutique.com.
In many cases your first selection will be taken by someone who
beat you to the punch (keep in mind that, in this case, there may be
hundreds of shops with the same name around the world – the internet is
global!). If fact after
checking on the web I’ve found that the name www.marysboutique.com
is taken. However, domain
names have several different “extensions” (e.g. “.com”) that you
can select from. The “.com” was originally created to be an abbreviation
for “company”. Since many
.com names were disappearing the global internet powers created
alternative extensions. In
our example we can select (as of this writing) any or all of the options
below: (there are extensions other than these).
Note that all domain names are in
lowercase (small letters). Domain
names do not recognize any difference between upper and lower case.
For example, www.MarysBoutique.us
is the same as www.marysboutique.us.
Also, the apostrophe cannot be used but a hyphen (“-“) can be
used, and usually is to get a domain name that is otherwise not available.
In our example www.marysboutique.com
was not available BUT the domain name www.marys-boutique.com
is available!
You need to be a little creative
when picking out a domain name. Keep
in mind that you will have to verbally speak and often spell this name to
people. It will be on your
business cards and letterhead. Make
sure you are comfortable with the name you select and you should not have
to pay more than $10 per year for your domain name.
CLICK
HERE TO CHECK FOR AVAILABLE DOMAIN NAMES
One important note here:
If you have someone else or a company register a domain name for
you, make sure that you are listed as the domain administrator.
This will save you some time and potential trouble when the time
comes to move your domain and hosting to a different vendor.
Step #2 – You need a
place to HOST your website.
Web hosting in simple terms is the rental of storage space on a
computer system connected to the internet where your domain name will
“point to”. While your
domain name is similar to the address of where you live, the hosting would
be the actual physical house or apartment that the address relates to.
Practically all companies that
can register a domain name for you will also offer associated services
like website hosting, email and site promotion (more on this later).
So the good news is that most of what you need to get stated can be
accomplished as “one-stop” shopping.
When you select a hosting service
there are considerations you need to be aware of.
How much space do you need? Most
hosting services charge monthly and the rate will depend on the amount of
storage space your website requires.
Since, at this point, you don’t have a website you may want to
opt for the least expensive offering from the hosting service.
You should confirm that you can upgrade services at no additional
cost other than the cost of the new hosting plan.
Most hosting services upgrade exactly as you require.
One thing that does differentiate many hosting services, other than
price, is whether you are entering into a contract for the service.
There are enough hosting services available on a month-to-month
basis that you should not enter into any long-term agreements for hosting.
If your website is going to sell
items from the site (e-commerce) you should verify that the hosting
company you choose does offer the options to allow for secure credit card
transactions. Since this
article is a “primer” we will not go into technical terms for options
like, CGI, PHP, Perl, SSL, database support, etc.
In most cases you will need some professional help to get an
e-commerce site started properly.
A basic web hosting plan should
not cost you much more than $5-$6 per month.
Various Hosting Plans increase price as does the size and
complexity of your website. Most
basic site hosting plans will include at least one email address with your
site (yourname@yourdomainname.com)
as well. You should be able
to pick the email name on the left side of the “@” to be whatever you
want. The size of the inbox
for the email account may vary by hosting company and plan.
Additional email accounts can usually be added for a reasonable
monthly or annual cost. The
more email accounts you get the better the value, like 50 accounts with
250MB of storage for $40/year).
Step #3 – You need an
actual WEBSITE. This step brings in WEBSITE DESIGN and determines what your
site will look like and how it will interact with people over the
internet. You may only need a
small simple website that you can create using software you already own
and know how to use. Microsoft
Word and PowerPoint can easily convert or save files in web format (HTML
or “as web pages”). If
you think that what you want is more complicated than you are willing to
deal with you should investigate website design alternatives.
Once again you will find that
many web hosting companies will offer on-line tools for the beginner to
create a simple, yet attractive websites in a very short period of time.
It is understandable that many “newbies” to the internet and
personal computing may not be comfortable creating even a simple website.
Odds are you can find many local companies and individuals who can
design a website for you. You
will also find that most web hosting companies also offer custom designed
websites for various rates and/or fees.
You may see a range of hourly rates for website design that run
from $20/hour to over $100/hour. Check
on the experience of the designer. You
may find that a designer working at $50/hour can do more in one hour than
a $20/hour designer can do in a day.
Don’t make this design decision solely based on an hourly rate.
Get comfortable with the designer.
Can you get the designer on the phone? Get your costs up front.
Many designers will create a prototype site at no cost so you can
make some decisions about the site appearance and the designer can get a
better grasp of what you want and how much time the designer will have to
spend creating the website. All
of this will lead to a better understanding so that costs and the final
product will be understood at the outset of the project.
When the website is complete you
will want a backup copy on CD for yourself.
This is important in the event you decide, for whatever reason, to
use a different designer. You
will want a copy of all “logins” and passwords with your website.
An additional item to consider is
support and service after the website is created, launched and live (since
we got this far we can start using some industry terms).
What are the maintenance costs for the website?
How much does it cost to make changes to your site?
Can you do your own changes and, if so, what software do you need
to make changes?
Step #4 – You need to
PROMOTE your website. Now
you have a domain and a website up and running – congratulations!
(BIG DEAL) How does
anyone know about your website? Unfortunately the internet is not like your local “Yellow
Pages” where all you have to do is get a commercial phone number and you
are in the book. Other than
you telling friends and relatives about your site and how to locate it,
your site will probably never be seen unless you promote the site – you
can call this “advertising”. This
is the part where your bubble of excitement about how wonderful the
internet is will burst. You
don’t think that Google, Yahoo, MSN and other big internet names do what
they do for free, do you? The
above mentioned search engines/portals are not the only ones, just the
best known and they are happy to show your site as a response to web
search but mostly for a fee.
Yes, you can submit your site
(and pages within your site) to search engines using free submission
tools. But unless you have
the most unique product on the face of the earth your listing will be
#1,482,407th and will never be clicked on from a search engine
unless you do some marketing. Don’t
ever think that that when you do a search that you are being given all the
results you would want, or even the results for a specific geographic
area. You will only see what that search engines has listed and the
listings at the front of the results page will always we the ones who pay
to be there (with very few exceptions).
If you have a huge budget you can
hire firms whose sole purpose is to optimize your website for search
engines and submit that site on a regular basis to the search engines.
If you are like most of the world you don’t have a huge or
unlimited budget so you’ll need to find some economical way to advertise
your site. Your web hosting
vendor should be able to offer you some simple search engine submission
tools to reasonable fees (less than $50) to get you started.
You can also purchase programs like “WebPosition Gold” to
install on your PC to do submissions on a regular basis.
You can submit pages from your site to free submission services
like SubmitExpress.com. Try
getting on the smaller search engines as well.
Sites like SearchSight.com,
FyberSearch.com, ExactSeek.com,
EntireWeb.com and
others will usually index your site and have you listed weeks before you
will ever see anything from Google, Yahoo or MSN.
For those big guys (Google/Yahoo/MSN) you will need to check those website for their
submission programs. For the
most part you will find that you will have a fee, monthly or annual, to be
listed and a fee for each time a web surfer clicks on your link from the
particular search engine. This
process, know as Cost Per Click or CPC, will require you to either select
or bid on the “Click Thru” charge and to provide a credit card to pay
for the charges as they accumulate. While
most click thru charges will be in the neighborhood of $0.15-$0.30 per
click you may see fees lower and higher depending on your type of
business. Personally it
scares me to think that one of these companies may be having a bad fiscal
quarter and they tell all their employees to start doing searches and
clicking on the results as fast as they can so the company’s revenues
will increase. While this
thought is rather absurd and would probably send a few corporate suits to
jail, it stays in my mind when I think about CPC rates. The good news is that you can usually limit the total CPC
charge on a weekly or monthly basis to keep to a reasonable budget.
There are other choices for paid
website promotion that include paying for or buying a specific search
term. Don’t get caught up
in the hype when a promotion company tells you they can make your site #1
in various search engines. The
fact is that they may actually be able to do what they say but what they
say is not what you are looking for.
For example, let say that you now have “marys-boutique.com” up
and running. A promotion company gives you the pitch that they can make
you #1 on Google – sounds too good to be true but they tell you or show
you examples. Many of these
deals are based on “ad words” or specific search phrases you pay to be
associated with on a particular search engine.
This promotion company may tell you to purchase the ad phrase
“clothing-women”. While
that phrase may sound good to you and how you would want to be found you
need to realize that very few if any web searchers are going to type the
phrase “clothing-women” into a search engine.
For more information about
websites, hosting and technology help in general please visit:
http://www.techhelpconsulting.com/websites.htm.
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