Why Do You Need a Website?

It must be said that most business will benefit from an online presence. People are increasingly turning to the Internet these days as a source for finding local products and services. Try to think of it as Yellow Pages only much bigger with far more information.
However, not many people posses the necessary skills to produce a web site that will look professional, stand out and get found by the most popular search engines. This is where I can help you by making sure that your site is optimised so that it meets all of these requirements.

It is particularly important that your site can be found online within the context of your local area and by the customers that you are aiming to target. I will ensure that your web pages will stand the best chance possible of getting found by search engines and achieve their optimum position within the search engine rankings.

Whether it is a simple “How to Find Us” or “How to Contact Us” type site or a fully fledged site to sell your products online I can advise you on the best way forward to meet your needs at a very competitive rate.

Remember that a good website will work for you 24 hours a day 365 days of the year for very little outlay and minimal maintenance costs.

What’s all this about Domain Names?

Computers on the Internet communicate with each other using Internet protocols. In order for one computer to be able to find another each one has to have a unique identifier on the Internet. These names consist of numbers e.g. 195.168.0.100 which are known as IP addresses or TCP/IP Addresses. Obviously these numbers are not very friendly to humans, so a way needed to be found to use human friendly names to locate computers (and hence Web Sites) on the World Wide Web. This is where Domain Names come in.

Domain Names are the human readable names that you and I use to find resources on the Web e.g. www.gullsoft.com is a Domain name that points to the computer that hosts my website which you are looking at right now. The computer however does not know about www.gullsoft.com it only understands numbers (IP Addresses) e.g. 195.168.0.100 so in order for the name to be converted or resolved to a number another computer on the Internet called a DNS Server or Domain Name System server is asked to resolve the name to an address.

So the first thing that you need to think about before you set up your Web Site is decide on a name that you and other people will use to find it. Most companies use www.companyname.com or www.companyname.co.uk or something similar to name their Web Site, this is not strictly required but it usually pays to follow convention with these things if you want people to find and remember your Web address. The name that you choose should reflect the business that you are trying to promote and you should devote a little time and effort to choosing this because you will (hopefully) be living with it for a long time and you will not be able to change it easily at a later date, so my advice is think carefully before you decide!

Once you have settled on a name you will need to check that it is available i.e. that someone else hasn’t already registered it e.g. I can guarantee that you will not be able to use www.tesco.com! If your chosen name is available then you can register it and begin using it to promote and host your online presence. There is an annual fee to keep the domain registered in your name and an initial cost to secure it. You will also need to provide some personal or company information which is held on a central register so that other people can check who has registered a name.

If all this sounds a bit technical and involved don’t worry I can carry out all the above tasks for you and will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Web Hosting

So your web site has been designed and built to your specifications and all the content is in place. So how do you go about getting it on the World Wide Web? Well this is where Web Hosting comes in.

In order for people to view your Web Site they need to be able to find it and then they need to be able to download your content to their computers and view it using their Web Browsers. When a web browser requests a page it does so using a special Internet protocol called HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), this request is sent to a Web Server computer across the Internet and the page is then sent back to the browser to display it. The Web Server computer is said to Host the requested page.

As an aside about Web Browsers this is another area in which many people lack the necessary experience to ensure that their Web Sites will cater for as wide an audience as possible; and they tend to use controls or packages that create sites that do not work properly on some browsers. I ensure that all my code will format correctly on both Internet Explorer and FireFox which are the two main browsers in use on the Internet today. I also ensure that my code is far as possible compliant with W3C standards.

Your new Web Site first needs to be uploaded to the Web Server computer before anyone can see it. Uploading is usually done using another Internet protocol called FTP (File Transfer Protocol) which copies the Web Site files from your computer to the Web Server.

But my Internet provider already gives me web space you may say. This is true, most ISP’s provide their customers with a small amount of personal web space for them to create a Web Site. This may be fine for individuals but in most cases will not be flexible enough for business use due to restrictions on space, bandwidth and domain naming.

I am able to offer my clients a Web Hosting Service that will suit most small businesses at a competitive rate. For bigger businesses or those with larger bandwidth requirements there are many companies out there offering Web Hosting services with virtually no limits except for the size of your cheque book! I can help and advise you on what would suit your needs.

Once more if all of this sounds like a lot of work don’t worry I can carry out some or all of the necessary work for you and will advise you on the best way forward for your business needs all as part of my personal service.

Email

Once your business becomes established and has set up a Web presence you will want your customers to be able to contact you. One of the methods for doing this is obviously via email.

The sending and receiving of email once again involves Internet protocols, in this case there are two main ones SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) which is used to send email and POP3 (Post Office Protocol) used top receive email. You may have noticed that most businesses have several email address associated with their domain name e.g. info@companyname.com or sales@companyname.com etc. These addresses allow people to send email to different mailboxes dependant upon the nature of their enquiry.

Mail messages are written using a client program such as Outlook Express. The client program then makes a connection to the mail Server Computer using the SMTP protocol and sends the message on its way. The message may travel through several other mail servers before it reaches its destination which will be the mail server responsible for the recipient’s domain. The destination server then saves the message into the recipients mailbox until such time as they connect to the mail server and download and read their messages using the POP3 protocol.

I can offer an email solution that would suit most small businesses in house so you do not have to go to the trouble of setting this up separately. There are also many other companies offering solutions dependent upon your needs and I will be able to advise you about your options if required.

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