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Websites for Beginners

So you’ve browsed the internet, and now you want to setup a website. Where to begin?

To setup a website you will need 5 basic things:

1. Website Name—often called a Domain Name
2. Hosting—a place to put your website
3. Design—the website itself
4. Marketing—there’s no point in putting up a website unless people see it.
5. Maintenance—the best websites are regularly updated and fresh

1. Website Name (Domain Name)

Every website on the internet has a unique name called a domain name, that distinguishes it from every other website. To get a domain name, you must use a “domain name registrar”—a service that registers your website name as yours. Domains are registered annually (although they can be registered for multiple years). Domains will typically cost between $5 and $35.

See the article “Website Domain Names” for complete details.

2. Hosting

A host is a service that will store the computer files that make up your website. A good host has a data center—a building that connects to telephone companies, with large, expensive telephone lines. Better data centers have backup power systems including onsite generators, connections to multiple telephone companies, and an army of computer geeks that keep all of these computers (called web servers) up and running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

To put it simply, imagine your website is a billboard. Once you have a billboard designed, you need a place to stick it. Your web host is that place for your website.

There are many hosting services on the internet ranging from a few dollars per month to hundreds. Generally, the more you pay, the more control, space, and speed you get. Cheap hosting companies (that charge less than $5 per month) are typically slow and may not have full data centers with power backup. These hosts are usually slow because many website (50 or more) may be hosted on each computer.

Medium-priced hosting companies (between $5 and $30 per month) typically offer a good range of services for small websites (websites with less than 10,000 pages that receive less than 100,000 visitors per month). This range of web hosts typically has between 25 and 50 websites per computer, so they perform much better.

Web hosting between $30 and $100 per month usually offers features for web designers and other internet professionals. These hosts usually have less than 20 websites per computer.

Hosting above $100 per month typically includes “dedicated” hosting, in which a dedicated computer (web server) is set aside specifically for your website(s). Because this computer is for you alone, it often performs much better when you have a lot of visitors, and you have more control over what programs run on the machine.

3. Web Design

Finding a good web designer can take some work. While you want an aesthetically pleasing (pretty) website, functionality and ease of use are equally as important. You will usually want a site that is very visual (several pictures per page) and concise on information. That is not to say you should only have a paragraph per page…just avoid being long-winded.

Many designers like to use a feature called “Flash”, which enables animations, movies and sound on a website. While making websites fancy will show you spent time and money to develop your site, keep in mind why your visitors are looking at your site. If your website is about computer games, then sounds, movies, and interactivity are what your visitor wants. However, if your site is informational, make sure this interactivity does not impede navigation or the message of your site.

Read the article "Web Design Blunders" to identify situations to avoid.

4. Marketing

The most common mistake new website owners make is to spend there entire budget on design and not leave anything for marketing the site. The effect is a website that no one sees.

There are two primary ways to get visitors to your website: internet advertising and traditional advertising. Internet advertising can include email campaigns, search engine marketing (getting listed on sites like Yahoo and Google), reciprocal links (you link to another website and they link to you) and paid advertising (banner and text ads on other sites). See the article “Website Marketing”.

Traditional advertising refers to advertising methods that don’t use the internet itself. These can include TV, radio, and newspaper ads, flyers, business cards, word of mouth, vehicle ads, and billboards to name a few. If you are building a website to provide a service to your existing customers (for example online orders, order tracking, photo viewing, etc.) traditional advertising will be more your speed.

Beware of web designers that charge extra to include things like search engine marketing. Most reputable design firms like All In One will include this automatically.

5. Maintenance

Finally, if you want to keep visitors coming back you need a way to maintain and update your site to keep it fresh. You can either plan an annual budget to have your designer do the updates, or you can setup a Content Management Interface—a way for you to make many of the updates to your website yourself, without paying the designer extra money. All In One Web Services typically recommends content management systems with its website designs.