Basics of Owning A Website
These days having a website is the same as having a business card. If you have a serious business or organization, you have to have one, and it better be good!
Following are the basic requirements of a decent, working website; a site that will represent your company, service or organization, properly.
Your Domain Name
Your domain name (that is, the website name) is crucial.
It doesn’t have to be your actual business name and, in certain instances, a name other than your company name can be effective.
Regardless, your domain name should be relevant to your business or organization and, of course, the name has to be available. It’s entirely possible that what you think is the perfect domain name for your endeavor has been taken.
The Blessing in Disguise.
If “YourPerfectWebsiteName.com” has been taken, it will force you to think about your business model!
WHY is this a “good” thing?
Because it helps you get more clear on your business, your service and what you have to offer to your prospects. It helps you develop your edge!
The Dirty Little Secret About Domain Names
Did you know you don’t “OWN” a domain name (unless you’re McDonalds or the like)? You lease a domain name for a year, 5 years, ten years; just about any term you wish but, again, unless you’ve trademarked the name you want, you don’t own a dotcom name.
Hosting
Your files reside, are “hosted”, on a server, which is simply a specialized computer set up to serve up the files that create your site. Servers require a certain amount of maintenance and different servers perform differently. The server also needs to be kept secure, lest a site ends up serving ads or other, even worse content (such as trojans and/or virus’) from an off-shore hacker.
These are the reasons for varying prices for hosting. Hosting can be found for very short money but you can be guaranteed that the performance, maintenance & security will leave plenty to be desired. You’ll need someone experienced to, at best, maintain and tune up your server or, at worst, try and salvage your server, site and reputation.
Website Files
Pretty much everyone has heard about the alphabet soup of code that’s used to write web pages. That soup includes HTML, CSS, Php and many, many others. There are services that offer inexpensive, “build your own website” programs (and there’s very expensive software out there to the same end) but, unless used by a skilled & knowledgeable programmer, these programs create code that’s near worthless for any serious web endeavor.
Website Design
Last but not least is the design of your website. This goes beyond JUST the look of the site; it includes a number of factors that either improve or decrease the usability of your web site. Color palette, fonts, images, layout and site navigation all combine to create a design that either provide an excellent user experience, a terrible experience or something in between.
These are the foundation of your website. You’ll need all of these building blocks in order to actually have a website. The higher quality blocks you have, the more effective and trouble-free your website will be going forward.
