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 internet 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 compared 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 yourself 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 easily 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 register your domain for you, and a lot of domain registrars offer you web hosting. Every one’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 registrars 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 recommend 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 domain 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 company should also offer goodies. Goodies are extras that your hosting company 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.
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 register 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 recommend 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 domain 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 company should also offer goodies. Goodies are extras that your hosting company 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 company 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.
The Middle: I’ve got a domain and a hosting company, now I need a website!
As was mentioned before Wordpress originally started as open source blogging software you could get for free to install on your website, and it still is this but also so much more. It’s very straight forward to configure Wordpress to be your business’s website.
Wordpress is what is known as a CMS, a Content Management System. Wordpress does something very important very well, it separates the content of your site from the design. Now this is key, by separating the design and the content you have become forward thinking. Today your site might look completely awesome, but a year from now what will you think? Sites built with older methods integrating the content with the design are incredibly hard to update or upgrade withough tearing everything down and building it up from scratch, and you don’t want to have to start all over again in a year or two.
Wordpress allows you to change the design of your website without interfering with the content. By simply logging into the administrative tool for your Wordpress website, you can quickly preview one of the 40 pre-installed themes, or you can search through hundreds of free and inexpensive themes available on the internet. You can even hire designers to custom build your Wordpress theme for you. And since your content is separate, it’s all still there when you change your design. That’s thinking forward!
The big idea here is to get your website up and functional, and allow you to start adding content. Then as you deem necessary you update the look and feel depending on what your needs are and whats available at the time.
Knowing your site is working for you is also important. Wordpress offers plug-ins to help you integrate with services like Google Analytics to show you what kind of traffic your site is getting. There also a plug-in called Akismet that helps you rid your comments area of spam. There are plug-ins to help you quickly integrate video, audio and images. There are widgets from companies like Twitter and Flickr to allow you to quickly integrate content from those sites into your site. And so many other things I can’t even begin to go into.
Keep your eyes open here for a series of articles that will walk you through the setup of wordpress, its themes, and plug-ins.
The End: I’ve got my site up, whats next?
It’s incredibly easy to ignore your website once you have gotten it up. No one will re-visit a stagnant website, and this doesn’t help your business in the least. Here are a few thoughts on how you keep driving your customers to your site, and help you out in the process.
- Hold a Photo Contest. Have your customers take pictures of your shop or product and email them in (or tag them in flickr or something). You get a bunch of stock photography that you can use on your site, and the prize doens’t have to be that major.
- Have a tweet day. Choose a day and invent a hash tag (#mycoolbusiness) that people can tweet about on twitter, select a winner at random for a prize.
- Hold a Yelp contest, a randomly chosen reviewer gets a prize.
- Create a fan page on facebook
- Tweet your daily specials
- Post Qik.com or Seesmic.com video testimonials from customers.
- New social media opportunities are coming up all the time, just try something out and see if it can hook into your website.
The point is that you don’t let your site become a hole no one visits, you’d be surprised what kind of traffic you might be getting (which is why it’s important to use google analytics). Just keep playing with the stuff and see who you engage.
Want to install Wordpress or find a host: http://wordpress.org/