Three Things You Need To Get Online

Monday, 27 October 2008 17:39

You decide you're going to join the internet generation and put your business online.  You do a little research and learn that websites are built with a computer language called html.  As a cost oriented small business owner, you decide that you're going to get your tech saavy nephew to put it together for you.  He builds your website in neon green with a giant marquee title that scrolls from one side to the other with your business's name, "The Widget Store."

It's hideous.  You Google, "build website," and find a big company that offers something called, "Website Builder."  It comes with "cheap hosting" and a "domain name." Their site says that it is everything you need to get your website online.

And they're correct.  The three major elements you need to get a website are: code(which their website builder supplies), hosting, and a domain name.

The Code

We already know what the code is, it's all those brackets and words that make absolutely no sense to the common person.  Both your nephew and the big company's Website Builder program created code.  What you may not know, and you should, is that the quality of code varies greatly and it matters how good the code is.

You don't want to use either your nephew or the Website Builder.  The poor quality of code will lower your search engine rankings and will likely cause visual errors on your web page.

For your edification, here is a list of likely candidates for poor quality code:

• your nephew or niece
• the Website Builder program
• Microsoft Frontpage
• Dreamweaver
• other WYSIWYG editors ("What You See Is What You Get")

And a list of likely suppliers of good code:

• that very expensive web design company
• the less expensive designers and developers who, "code by hand," and create, "valid and semantic," code.

In addition to the quality of code, an easy way to check a potential web designer's code is to use the W3C validator at http://validator.w3.org/ . All you do is type in the address of the designer's work and it will tell you whether or not it is error free and valid.  Any site that has over 15 errors on its page is not well written.  Ideally, the pages should be error free, but a few errors are forgivable.

The Hosting

Web hosting is the service where a company, like Blue Bridge, provides special computers that stay on all the time and display your webpage when someone types in its location.  These computers are called servers, because they serve your files to whoever requests them.  Pricing for web hosts varies greatly and it's because the quality of web hosts varies greatly.  Companies like GoDaddy advertise hosting for $5.00 a month.  Other companies charge over $200 a month.  It's not necessarily true that you get what you pay for, however if you sign on with a company whose marketing delivers more than their servers, you will be able to tell.

Here are some basic points on making a good decision:

Disk Space:

Hardly anyone needs more than 200mb of disk space.  The promises of, "unlimited space," are easy to offer because no one takes up much space.  Web sites are built tiny because they have to be delivered over incredible distances.  How to tell if your site might be an exception?  If you plan on offering lots of video and audio, than you definitely want unlimited space.

Bandwidth:

Bandwidth is how much file transfer you're allowed. That's how much file space you're allowed to "server" to your viewers each month.  If you have unlimited disk space, but only a few hundred megabytes of transfer your site will be pulled down as soon as your visitors have seen more than your bandwidth allows.  How much this is will vary with how popular your site is.  It's important for your bandwidth to be able to scale with your popularity and that you can afford to bump up to the next higher level of bandwidth without breaking the bank. Sites with lots of video and audio need lots of bandwidth.

Software

You want to sign up with a hosting provider who uses the latest web server software.  If a potential hosting provider doesn't provide information on what sort of software the servers run, chances are that they're out of date.  For example, Yahoo lists a lot of benefits to signing with them, however they don't prominently list any technical specifications for what sort of servers they have and what type of software they run.  The last time I worked with someone on Yahoo, the server software was out of date by several versions.  This impacted my client in that they could not use the latest open source software and that put them at a competitive disadvantage.  If you're using open source software, which I recommend, you want MySQL 5 or greater and PHP 5.2 or greater.

Support

Look for companies that offer multiple ways to get support for your site. This robust support network is an indications that they care about keeping their customers and keeping their customer's sites up.

The Domain Name

A domain name is the address that people type into the location bar to find you.  Examples are "google.com", "wikipedia.org", "yourwidgesstore.biz."  You purchase a domain name through a registrar and they register it for you in a big list.  The hosting computers have what's called an IP address that is a numeric address for where your website lives (i.e. 72.249.166.216)  The list your site is registered to matches your domain name with that address.  The quality of your domain registrar is not that important.  The only requirement you should have of them is that you can easily change your domain name, whenever you want, and at no cost to you (besides the annual registration).

 

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