A beginner's guide to having a website - Covering the basics of domain names, web design, and hosting and how to find good service providers.

First, congratulations on a decision to have a website.  Having a website is a great way to be better reachable by your customers and others.  Whether you are awake or sleeping, your website can disseminate important information about your company, hours of operation, products/services, contact information, etc.  It can also leave a lasting impression about you or your company or organization.

To have a website, generally you need three things:

1. Domain name – name of your website, such as www.google.com
2. Web design – through a web design firm, you can have your very own website created online with information, photos, and videos about you and/or your company
3. Hosting – all of your information, photos, and videos need to be located online somewhere in a way that is accessible for others to view your site.

Domain Name - Some Basic Tips for Getting a Domain

First, do some research about how to choose a domain name.  If you are targeting the international audience, it may be best for you to choose a domain name that ends with a .com or a .net if you are a business or individual and .org if you are a non-profit organization.  If you are targeting a market in a specific country, you may choose domain extension of that country.  For example, you might want to choose .mn for targeting Mongolian market.

Here are a few important notes about domain names:

1. Make sure to do some quality research and consultations before deciding on the domain name.  Once you choose the domain name, it will be very difficult to change it back again.
2. If there is a domain name that you absolutely love, it might make sense to move fast and purchase the domain if it is still available.  The reason is that good domain names do not stick around.  Other people pick them up.
3. Use some precaution and judgment as far as with whom you share your domain name idea.  If that someone likes your domain, he/she may buy your domain before you do!
4. Make sure to purchase your domain through trusted domain registrars.  Otherwise, a “fishy” domain registration company may register your domain and try to sell it back to you.

You can purchase your .com .net and .org domain names from trusted service providers such as Bluehost, GoDaddy, and Moniker.  We use the latter.  We find moniker.com to be a high quality and reliable service provider. Plus, the normal registration prices are cheaper; Moniker makes money from its premium services.  

.mn domains can be purchased from Datacom at datacom.mn.  We find that its pricing is still way too high at $35 per .mn domain.  Their customer service, however, is personal and very good though.  They are one of the few domain registration companies that will actually call to remind you that your domain names are expiring (I think you have to be in Mongolia for this, but still this is nice).

If needed, we can assist with domain name registrations as well as acquisitions of already owned domains.

To read more about choosing the right domain, click here: How do I choose the best domain name for my business?

 

Web Design 101 - Finding and Choosing the Right Website Design Service Provider

There are many ways to have a website.  You could use ready templates and try doing yourself.  You could also hire someone (either a freelancer or a professional web design firm) to build your site for you.

The advantage of using templates and trying to do it yourself is obviously to save money.  If saving money is your most important thing, maybe this makes sense for you.  If, also, you are a technical and web savvy individual, maybe you could muster a very decent site on your own.  For many of us, however, doing it ourselves could result in a website that is not quite professional or of high quality.  As such, you might be vulnerable to leaving an amateurish impression on your clients and business partners.

Typically, it makes sense to have someone professional and experienced to do your website.  There are two popular options here: freelancers and web design firms.  For businesses and organizations, I will recommend the latter.  Of course, I am biased.  However, on the whole, web design firms tend to be a bit more professional, responsible, and available for support and emergency needs.  There are many fantastic freelancers out there.  However, many are often times too busy, have other obligations, or change jobs.  And any of the above examples could make it more challenging for businesses to work with the freelancer.  I will note again that I take nothing away from some of the really great freelancers with years and years of experience and dedication in the field.  For the purpose of this article, you can basically just consider these highly qualified freelancers in the same sense when I talk about web design firms.

Professional web design firms will typically do a much better quality work, saving you time, and headache.  I have heard of many horror stories of people choosing someone in their family or the neighbor's son's friend to do the website, and not having something professional

Choosing the Right Web Design Firm

There is an array of web design firms out there.  So, how do you choose the right company?

In order to make a better judgment and choose the right web design firm, there are a wide variety of items that you should consider:

• Specialty – Are they better at highly technical projects, at pretty designs, at marketing websites, or at large corporate sites?  Do their specialty match your needs?
• Experience – How experienced do they have?
• Reference – how reputable are they?  Are the existing customers happy?
• Understanding your needs – does the company understand your business needs?  Can they tailor the website design to fit your and your clients’ needs?
• Cost, availability, time frame, and others

Of the above list, understanding your specific business and/or organizational needs and then being able to tailor the website to that is probably the most important aspect that is often neglected.

You should also consider that your website should be Search Engine Friendly (SEF).  If you have a website that is pretty but does not get found online by your customers, then what good does it do to have a website?  Or what if your competitor got a website that ranks higher in search results because they hired search engine optimization (SEO) specialists or had a website built that is friendlier to search engines?

Hosting - What's In a Good Hosting?

You can think of hosting as something akin to an office space.  For your business, you need office space to place all your furniture and to locate your business.  Likewise, you need place for all of your online content (text, images, videos, etc).  

The most important things to note on hosting are what I will call The Three S's of Hosting:

• Support - quick resolutions from knowledgeable staff
• Security - safe from iframe virus attacks and hack attempts - This is very important because you have your website files including most likely emails as well on your hosting.  , possibly emails and other things) is secure – you do not want your site hacked or to have virus installed on your site that loads onto all your website visitors
• Speed - your website loads fast and consistently for your website visitors (hosting speed and uptime)

Cheap hosting can mean tons of headaches for you.  Imagine your customers saying your website was down or not loading.  Or worse, imagine your customers having viruses installed on their computers from your site.  Or, what if hackers accessed your email accounts on your hosting?  With cheap, inexpensive, or lower quality service providers, you will have headaches and you will spend way more time than it is worth.

Great hosting typically does not take any of your time.  In fact, you hardly ever have to think about the hosting.  It just works.  You really do not spend much time with them at all.  With great hosting companies, your website loads fast and consistently, you don’t have issues with security and/or backups, the support is reachable by phone and other methods, and you are free to spend more time on your business.

To learn more, you are welcome to read about our hosting services or see the list of recommended hosting service providers.

A few other notes on getting a website

In addition to a website, you are probably looking to have a professional email address at your domain.  You can have a professional email address as soon as you have chosen and have purchased your domain name and hosting company.  Either your web design service firm or your hosting company will probably help you set up your email.  For a few email account setup, your web design or hosting companies can assist for free.  Typically, many of the domain registration services do not assist with email setup or they do not do it for free.

If you have any questions, please feel free to comment or to contact us.  If you choose to do business with us, we can help out more in depth with choosing the right domain and having a successful web presence online.

Does your company have a website?  How did you carry out your web design process?

Share this Digg Del.icio.us Reddit StumbleUpon Slashdot Yahoo Blinkbits Googlize this Blinklist Export PDF Print E-mail