Posted: March 28th, 2007
Your website – don’t know where to start?
A simple guide to getting started with your web site
This guide is designed for those people that are feeling a little out of their depth with the prospect of setting up a new site or modernising an old site. Many clients have previously been overcharged, misguided or trapped into heavy costing contracts. This short guide aims to give you a few items to look out for and boost your confidence.
The costs of a web site can be split into four areas, which are then explained in more detail:
1. Domain registration
2. Hosting and e-mail services
3. Web site design
4. eCommerce
5. Ongoing maintenance
1. Domain Registration
The first step is to choose your sites address, which is called its domain (e.g. www.realisingdesigns.com). The cost of your domain varies depending on the type, for example a “.co.uk” address is £9.99+VAT for 2 years, whereas a “.com” address is more at £24.99+VAT.
You can check whether the domain address you would like is free here and use the tool to generate ideas for you based on a selection of keywords you enter.
Tips: Your domain name should be easy to remember, relevant, easy to type and not too long – after all, just think how many times you will have to give it out!
2. Hosting and e-mail services
Your web site will spend its life sitting on a “web server”, which is a computer that will display your site to your visitors when they visit in their web browser. For people to see your site the machine needs to be on every minute of every day and have a enough space set aside for all your files and images. This is what your hosting cost covers and gives the public access to your site.
There are always cheaper options available, but some may not be as reliable. Our hosting has a 99.99% up-time guarantee (i.e. your site will be virtually all the time). After all there is not much point spending out money on a web site if most of the time users have problems are have trouble accessing it!
You may also want various e-mail accounts at your address, i.e. “sales@realisingdesigns.com” or “info@realisingdesigns.com”. You will also want a master e-mail account that collects all the mail that doesn’t belong to a named account.
We charge £120 per annum for hosting with a generous space allowance of 500MB, 2 databases, e-commerce facility and up to 10 e-mail accounts! With this hosting plan it includes everything you will need to have a medium sized site with medium amounts of media. We can tailor your hosting to suite any needs, such as additional databases or e-mail accounts – this can also be adjusted at any stage should you needs change once you are up and running. This service is provided to you via Realising Designs as an agent for Namesco, an award winning provider.
Tip: Be weary of companies that won’t provide you the information to access your site and ask for you to send all changes to them, they may be out to overcharge you, or charge an overly large annual maintenance fee.
3. Web site design
You now have a domain, the ability to put a site on it, but no site. The site design cost will vary according to what you type of site you are after, but can range for a simple site at the £500 mark, upwards to more complex custom programmed sites.
There are may extras you may want to consider, such as the use of Flash for animations, presentations, adverts or just to make your site stand out from the crowd or to include media, such as an MP3 player or a photo gallery.
Another common choice is installing a content management system, which is essential for sites with lots of content or articles. Such systems are designed to take the leg-work out of the site for you and provide you with a clear graphical interface to maintain your site.
One of the biggest and rising requests is for e-commerce facilities, which is the ability to sell via the web. Cost varies greatly with the size of products you are selling and I use different technologies for each case, picking the e-commerce facility that best suites the client and the right price.
Please contact me today for a free quote or no-pressure discussion or your web needs. All our contact details can be found on my contact page.
4. eCommerce
eCommerce can be a real strength to your site and a great way to show your product to a vast number of people. Your store will be open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day and so is a real workhorse. eCommerce can be expensive and so you want to get a product that is secure, works well for both you to run and the customer to browse.
We offer two services, one is free with our Plus hosting plan and caters for people with under 25 items. The second option utilises SEM Store and is a fully featured, CMS, search engine optimized, unlimited product eCommerce solution, which starts at £2000.
There are also free eCommerce stores such as osCommerce (www.oscommerce.com), which work well but do not offer the same level of customisation or integration into an existing site.
5. Ongoing maintenance
Typically most customers can update their own sites with the day to day changes that may occur and a simple-to-use control panel is provided to allow changes to your e-mail accounts. Our charge rate is very competitive at £25 per hour for web site maintenance, but if you plan regular updates we recommend you arrange an annual or monthly maintenance fee to include a certain allowance of time allocated to you for changes.
Tip: Some companies will try to tie you into costly maintenance plans, please remember that with Realising Designs once you have your site and the hosting, you are still free to look around and approach other companies for changes. Some companies do not deal so openly and so take care you don’t get trapped into a deal that will not provide you with the best of care.
Do you require a maintenance quote?
We hope you have found this article useful, you are welcome to e-mail us with any questions, recommendations or suggestions, all of which are gratefully received.
Share this post:
Twitter
Facebook