So you’ve determined that your business or project needs a website, and you don’t know where to start. Initially this sounds like an expensive proposition; ‘I guess I’ll need to hire a web designer’ is what you might be thinking. You might also be thinking that this will take a long time and be expensive, and in this economy that could be a deal breaker. What should your first move be? How do you get your stuff to the web? What do you do now?
Your first thought might be that kid you know who learned some HTML in school could help you out, or you maybe you should take a class at your local Community College, maybe you even have a designer friend who used to work on the web way back in the day. It’s not all that difficult to find someone in your surroundings that has some experience with this. Before you decide to engage some person in working on your website, stop and ask yourself how much has stuff changed in just the last couple of years on the internet.
How has your inernet usage changed in the last couple of years? Do you use it more? Have you watched a video on the internet recently, maybe even caught a TV show? How much more e-mail do you write today compaired to two years ago? Has Oprah or Ellen gotten you hooked on Twitter? Have you found friends on Facebook from school? Has the internet gotten a lot cooler and more engaging over the past couple of years?
Now ask youself about that person your about to engage in creating that website. Are they actually currently working in the web industry somewhere, or did they used to do web stuff before the dot com bust? Have they actually finished a project, and did it engage your attention?
The act of putting content on the internet for others to see isn’t that difficult of a task, but there are a lot of details that can easilly get missed and detract from user experience. The web industry is constantly changing, and new methods of creating engaging content are being invented every day. A developer in the web industry is constantly re-educating themselves in order to stay relevant.
Lets Get Real!
So what can you do? Well not only has the web gotten to be a much more engaging experience over the past couple of years, but also people have made a lot of tools to make it easier to make things that go on the web, including your website. In this article I’m going to talk about a tool called Wordpress, which originally started as a blogging tool, but has evolved into an easy to use CMS (Content Management System). Basically if you can write an e-mail, you can update a wordpress driven website.
The Beginning: Your Domain and Web Host
You may or may not have registered a domain yet. That is where you will need to get started. Most web hosting companies will offer to regester your domain for you, and a lot of domain registrars offer you web hosting. Everyone’s situation is different, and all domain registrars and web hosts have good periods and bad periods (i.e. downtime, lack of support, etc…). You should stay away from domain registars web hosting packages. They are usually expensive and difficult to use.
Finding a good website hosting company can be problematic as well, but not quite as bad. Do shop around, and see if anyone you know can reccomend someone. You shouldn’t be paying more than $5-10 / month, usually you get a better rate for prepaying for a year. Don’t prepay too far in the future, if for some reason you find you need to switch because of excessive website or e-mail down time, you will know within the first year. Registering your domail through your web host should also be affordable (around $10/year), even if you have a domain already you may want to register another.
Your web hosting comany should also offer goodies. Goodies are extras that your hosting comany gets for free, and can offer for free. A sub-domain would be considered a goodie (i.e. http://products.mycoolwebsite.com or http://help.mycoolwebsite.com). Another very common goodie is a one click Wordpress installation. Installing wordpress on a website is an incredibly easy (free) thing, and if the hosting comany you are looking at isn’t offering it you should be looking elsewhere. Plus this is the next step to getting your website up and running.
Continue Reading: [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4]
