Domain Registration and Hosting

There are 2 services you need for an existing website:

• You need to register the domain.  A domain is your address.  http://www.cit-services.com is a domain.  Domain registration is cheap, somewhere between $9 and $20 a year depending on the company you choose as the registrar.  Registrar companies include Network Solutions and GoDaddy. About 5 companies have 90% of the registrations in the USA.
• You need someone to host your website.  Actually you can do it yourself if you have a server and a good internet connection ( DSL is a marginal internet connection ).  GoDaddy and some of the other Registrars also do hosting, but it is common to use separate companies.  Hosting can be inexpensive, $5 a month or several hundred dollars a month depending on your requirements.  Many website designers do their own hosting because they already have servers and high-speed internet connections.  I do not normally charge separately for hosting, it is bundled into a yearly fee with light maintenance.

If you choose to register your own domain, you have 100% control over your website, if you no longer like your website designer you can fire him.  If you no longer like your hosting company, you can find another. But if you forget to renew your registration, your website will go down.  If you ignore the situation for a few days then anyone can buy your domain and your only choice is to buy it back from them at whatever price they ask.  There are sharks that look for newly expired domains and charge thousands of dollars to their former owners who want them back.

I have the domain registrations for many of my customers.  I will never forget to renew them.  This means I have 100% control over these websites.  It works because I value my reputation as an ethical designer, and because I have someone I trust if I get hit by a truck.  Generally I tell customers that are very computer literate to register it themselves. If they are not computer experts or don't have the time, it is better for me to do it as there is much less risk of the domain expiring.

Phase #4 Designing your website

If you are like most professionals or business owners, your time is better spent on your business than on learning how to design your own website.  Nevertheless, you have a role:

The pictures on your website should be yours.  Few things look as artificial or as phony as 20-something models on a website.  Don't do that, be real, use real pictures.  If  you really are 25 years old and beautiful then use your own pictures!

The words on your website should mostly be yours.  Have someone proof your message for grammar. But if you are a landscaper or carpenter then you don't want the text on your website to sound like it was written by a Harvard lawyer.

Visit your website often.  10 minutes a day will do wonders for your website's importance.  Google and the others decide a website's rank based upon how important a website is.  How important can a website be if no one, not even the owner, visits it? Ask your friends to visit your website and give their opinions. Ask your customers to review you on Google Maps, Yahoo Local and Bing's Local.Live.

Consider creating a Blog with a link to your website and if you are on facebook, mention your website address occasionally.  It  helps!

Put your website address onto your business cards, etc.  If you have business cards or brochures without your website address, throw them away and get new ones printed.  Don't waste the opportunity to have someone visit your website!

Phase #3, Choosing a Website Designer

Before I start on this subject, I am a website designer. I am therefore biased, also informed.  I will try to be as objective here as possible.

Choosing a website designer is easier than you think.  Just look at the designer's websites and those of the customers:

• Are the websites attractive to you?  Although many of us use templates and you get to pick your template, everyone has a style and your style may not be compatible with a particular website designer's style.
• Can you find the website(s) of the designer in Google, Yahoo and Bing?  Do a website search in all 3 of these search engines.  For example, search on website design in CT if the designer is in CT.  Then search in the designer's city for example website design in Enfield CT.  Finally, choose a few cities near the designer, in my case Somers, Stafford, and Windsor CT and Longmeadow MA.  A website is seldom valuable if no one can find it. If you are dealing with an amateur that is exactly what is going to happen, no one is going to be able to find your website unless they already know about it.  When searching the entire State, keep in mind that there are thousands of website designers in CT, so don't expect to find me or your designer on page #1. On the first 10 pages is reasonable, though.
• Does the website load in a reasonable amount of time?  Anything over 2 seconds is too long, assuming that you have DSL or Cable Internet service.  There are tools that will tell you how long it really takes.  Unfortunately you cannot easily tell without these tools as all browsers cache. 
• Are there syntax errors in the designer's website?  If there are, beware.  The website may look perfectly fine in Internet Explorer Version 8 but may look horrible in Firefox, Safari, Chrome or Internet Explorer 7.  Don't appear unprofessional to half your website visitors.  You can check the syntax by going to the W3C Syntax Checker and entering the entire URL, for example http://www.cit-services.com .
• Finally there is price.  An average website page takes about 4 hours to create.  If you are buying a 5 page website, you are buying about 20 hours of someone's time.  Don't expect your website designer to work at minimum wage.  If you want shoddy work or spyware, go ahead and pay $200 for that website. There has to be a reason why someone would work for $5.00 an hour and you may be in for an unpleasant surprise when you find the reason.  Even in India, no one works for that little. 

In general, try to use a local designer, within 100 miles of your business.  You are investing a lot of trust in your designer; it is better to trust a neighbor than someone you will never meet.

Phase #2 Define your Audience

Your website designer will need to know the styles and preferences of your target audience.  Even if you are the website designer, take a half hour and think about your target audience.  Are they computer-savvy or not?  What are their likely color preferences?  Will Flash attract them or drive them away?  Please take a look at the nTh Degree website Is this likely to turn them off or attract them as compared to my main website

Phase #1, Choosing a Domain

You have a new company and want a website.  Choosing a domain name and registering it is the first step.  Obviously you cannot choose a domain that someone else owns, but you can choose a similar name.  For example CIT is a big mortgage company, it used to be a reputable name.  I wanted to use the three letters as a play on words to See-IT, where IT stands for Information Technology.  So I chose the name CIT-Services.com . Since I design websites and live in Enfield CT, I might have been better off choosing a name like enfield-website-design.com as that name contains 3 key words that people use to find a website designer in the Enfield CT area.  Of course I still can, in fact I have registered www.hartford-website-design.com and others since I have physical offices in other cities in CT.  In fact there are major advantages to having multiple websites, just don't create mirror websites as that is a violation of the rules Google and the other search engines use to rank websites.  As to what defines a mirror website violation, that is one of the mysteries known only to Google.  Basically if you are going to have 2 or more websites, they need different content.  For example, I own cit-services.info and cit-services.net . At first glance the .info and .net websites might appear to be mirrored, but really they are targeted at the two parts of my business, website design and video recording and production.