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Three steps to getting a
website online
Author: Charlie Stanley; Lucid Logic USA
Published: April 20, 2005
You have made the decision to have a website put online, now you need to
figure out where to start. It can be a bit overwhelming hearing all these
terms like domain name, registrar, hosting, and development.
When getting a website put together there are three steps. The first thing
you need to do is figure out what domain name you want to have. This would
typically be yourbandname.com assuming it is available or something similar.
You can get a domain name for under $15.00 a year from most websites. You
may see some websites out there that charge as much as $35 or even $70 a
year for this and you are getting absolutely nothing different, except some
of them may give you a printed certificate or something to that effect.
There is no benefit to paying more for this. The most important thing about
registering your domain name is making sure you are the registrant of the
name and valid contact information is provided to the domain registrar to
prevent you losing rights to your domain name and internet brand.
Once you have found an available domain name and registered it you will need
a server to host your new website and domain. This brings us to our second
step; a hosting account. A web hosting account is what will allow you to
store the actual website on the internet and allow it to be accessed when
someone types in the domain name while surfing the internet. This will also
allow you to have the ability to have email addresses that everyone in your
organization can use adding your brand to your email addresses (i.e.
yourname@yourcompany.com) or group mailboxes like sales@yourcompany.com that
automatically forwards to every email address for every sales member of your
organization. An individual or small to medium sized business should be able
to obtain a web hosting account for $10 to $25 a month; however you can
spend well into hundreds of dollars a month for larger ecommerce websites
that have thousands of visitors per day.
After you get your hosting account setup with a hosting provider that you
are comfortable with the project begins of getting your website designed.
You need to decide if you are going to design your website yourself or hire
a professional website design and development firm to assist you with the
project. If you plan on designing the website yourself you can design it
using web-based template systems or web development software like Microsoft
FrontPage, Macromedia Dreamweaver or Adobe GoLive. If you have never
designed a website before these programs can be helpful, but you will need
to have patience and lots of time to learn the different concepts of
development as you are designing your website as well.
If you prefer hiring a professional to design your website you can spend as
little as $100.00 or as much as, well the possibilities are endless. I have
designed dozens of websites that are only one page with contact information,
a company logo and some information regarding services offered by a company
for $100.00 and have went to the complete other extreme by designing
providing $15,000 is design work to one client over a period of two years
working with a team to build a website to our client’s specifications. Most
small businesses spend anywhere from $300 to $1000 for basic sites and
usually pay a few hundred dollars more for e-commerce. The most important
thing when hiring a design firm is to ask for references, ask them what
their specialties are, and of course to see samples of different work
performed. When reviewing samples ask how long a project took, and what the
end price was for their client.
That covers the three steps to getting a website put together and getting it
online. Hopefully this will make your web experience easier and more fun as
you are getting your website put together.
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