Website Basics

In this age, everyone wants to have an online presence. There’s many reasons why, perhaps it’s because they want to express themselves to everyone else, tell the world of their experiences, showcase their talents or their organizations, be immortalized in a network that promises to never die or simply be super cool. If you want to be online too, here’s website basics will tell you what you need to know.

Back to Basics

The 3 most basic things you need to get a website up and running:

1. A Domain
2. Web Hosting
3. A Website

It’s not very difficult to get any of these items on the list, but being smart about it quite important. There’s plenty of companies out there who will throw all sorts of “deals” your way, but it’s not necessarily good for you. Picking the right company to do the job for you is key, especially when it comes to down-time (how long the website is expected to be offline) and quality of service (speed, post sales service, etc.)

The Domain

This is easy to read way to tell people where to go when they want to get to your website. For example, to get to this blog, you typed-in or clicked on a link that pointed you to terencepereira.com. This is divided into two main components, the Top Level Domain (TLD) and the domain name. The TLD is the bit that comes at the end which in this case is com. There are plenty of TLD’s now available and the list keeps on growing. However, for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes, you want to stick with the more common TLD’s. The other bit that differentiates you from others on the .com TLD is your domain name and you could have pretty much anything here. For me, it’s my full name that makes up my domain name. Although this could be anything, picking a meaningful domain name is still important, both for SEO and making it easy for people to remember.

Commonly people register their domains with their web host. I however recommend keeping your domain away from your web hosting. The main reason for this is, of all these three things, you’re most likely to have issues with your web hosting service. And with domain transferring being such a pain, you’d be better off not going through that trouble. It’s much easier to just change nameservers with your domain provider if you should decide to move hosts.

I personally use Hover. They have a vast amount of TLD’s you can register with, they have a great easy to manage back end with a pleasing interface and their post sales service is excellent.

Web Hosting

Every website is made up of files, whether this be one single HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) file or a bunch of files that make up a dynamic website or web application. You need somewhere to host these files. While your very own computer could be a host to your website, the process to get this setup is complicated and tedious. There’s no need to despair though, there are plenty of web hosting companies out there offering great services for very reasonable prices.

Of the three, web hosting is the most likely of all to leave you frustrated at times. Web hosts usually have multiple website hosted on one server. Some web hosts don’t just look at the dolla signs and keep the number of web hosting accounts on a single server to a reasonable amount. There are however, some very commonly used web hosts that will cram a crazy number of accounts on one server and this can lead to all sorts of problems. You could have high server loads leading to slowed access times, errors on some sites needing server restarts thus leading to downtime and some very fatal security breaches that can occur if someone on the server has an unsecure website. And while all this is happening, they have so many people to contend with, their technical support is usually overrun and unresponsive.

So don’t always pick the most popular ones. Pick ones that are still smaller companies that offer a reasonable deal for an affordable amount. I have used, continue to use a really good host that I’m yet to have any major issues with. They provide a really good service for a reasonable fee and their customer service is lightning quick! I liked them so much, I recommended to the company I work for to move our entire client base to their servers and everyone’s been happy so far.

A Website

This is where things get really interesting. Websites have evolved so much over the last few years. We’ve gone from having static websites into dynamic websites that have a number of files containing intricate code bringing a website together and making it look good. But it’s no longer enough to make a website look good, with the dawn of the smartphone era, website have to be completely mobile friendly and website have had to adapt. Responsive design was the term coined to refer to a website that responds to a mobile device and scales down perfectly without losing it’s integrity or core functionality. So if you keep hearing about responsive design, if it’s not apparent, this is what it means.

A website is the expression of who you are and must immediately contain the message you’re trying to give to your visitors. It is after all and extension of yourself in digital form on a network for all public to see. For companies a website is like the extra man, working day and night without a moment’s rest, serving your customers with information and even getting information from customers. Having good design that doesn’t break is very important. It is always good to start simple and work your way up adding functionality as you go. Don’t jump into a fully functional web application that can do 10 different complicated tasks without research and testing.

The Web Designer

To get a decent website up and running may not be a simple task. If you’re not sure how to go about it, designing a website is best left to someone who know’s what they’re doing. A web designer can be someone who designs and hosts a website for you, or simply design a website and hand it over to you for hosting. More commonly a web designer will help you through the entire process from getting a domain name, choosing good hosting and designing your website.

Web designers come in a variety of flavours, you generally have companies that specialize in web design and you have freelancers. Both of these have their advantages and disadvantages, the deciding factor for most people looking to get a website done is usually the costs involved. Web design companies usually charge a much higher amount but you get the benefit of security knowing your work is backed by a strong contract and a team of web designers, developers and graphic artists. With a freelancer, you may not have that sense of security and are probably dealing with one web designer who’s abilities might be limited thus limiting the potential of your website. All this however, is very subjective as I know of freelancers who work much better than some web design companies and this mainly comes down to best practices.

Conclusion

I hope that helped you understand the basics of getting a website set up and running. I’d encourage everyone to pursue having a personalized website or even a blog to put your thoughts down. Other people tend to like interesting people, so if you thing you’ve got something interesting to say and want to share it with others but don’t know how, I can help set you up a blog that will get people reading what you have to say.

If you need to have a website designed or need some advice before you decide to proceed, I can help. Drop me a message here.

Read here about my thoughts on web design in Oman.