Website Design Ideas
Getting Started
There are things you'll need to get your website online. Here are the basics to get started.
Domain Name – The URL of your website that will be listed in the Domain Name Servers (DNS) and route people to your website! Website servers have an IP (internet protocol) address. URL's are easier for people to remember than IP addresses so DNS translates the URL to an IP address so the internet routing system can route your visitors to your website.
Ideally your domain name should be as close to your company, or organization name as possible. If your website is a personal website, then the URL might be your name. Note that there are no spaces in a URL so the website name will be something like FMNETDESIGN.COM or ButchFralia.NET.
The domain name suffix (*.com, *.net, or *.org) is the Top Level Domain or TLD. There are a limited number of TLD's available. Some of the TLDs available are as follows:
COM – Commercial Business
EDU – Educational Institutions
GOV – Goverment Agencies
MIL – Military
NET – Network Organizations (i.e., hosting companies)
ORG – Non-Profit organizations
In addition to the TLD, an additional 2 character code may be appended to the URL, the ISO (International Standards Organization) country code of where the website is located.
If you're planning on keeping the domain for awhile, it's best to purchase/reserve the domain name for multiple years. Additionally some people like to protect their domain name by purchasing domains with the additional TLDs though they only plan on using one TLD. This prevents someone else from getting the domain name with another TLD and using it for some purpose detrimental to their own website. At one time domain registration was expensive on an annual basis so reserving all the domain names was a large investment. Now that registration fees have gone down, it's a reasonable investment.
Hosting – Unless you have a large company with it's own data center, you'll probably need a hosting company for your website. A web-server is a computer with specialized software so that when a request comes in from the internet for a webpage, the server knows where to find the page. The server returns the page and it's associated files to the requestor.
There are a number of considerations for selecting your hosting service and the hosting plan you'll be using for your website. If the website is created using specialized software such as Cold Fusion® or Miva®, you'll need specialized hosting that supports those products. If you're developing a Microsoft® centric website, you'll need hosting on a Microsoft® based server. Standard HTML websites can be hosted by almost any hosting company with both LINUX/UNIX Apache Server or Microsoft®/IIS servers. PHP/MYSQL website can be hosted by a wide selection of hosting companies it's common to find both LINUX/UNIX Apache Server or Microsoft®/IIS Servers that support PHP and MYSQL.
Some of the considerations for hosting companies involve cost, services and reliability. It doesn't help to have the cheapest hosting if your hosting computer has a lot of downtime. Other things to look at are the extras that come with the hosting plan. Do you get e-mail accounts, mailing lists, does the service include a statistics package. Does the account have ample space for your website? How easily can you upgrade your hosting plan?
If you can easily upgrade your hosting plan, you can start with an inexpensive plan. If your website takes off and you want to expand it, you can upgrade on the fly with a good hosting company.
Content – Once you decide for sure you are going to have a website, you may want to purchase your domain name and have it reserved. Until you have content, there isn't a need for hosting so you can wait until you have minimal content developed before purchasing hosting.
The minimum content for a website is one page! At least a home page with contact information along with a summary of the information you want to present to your website visitors.
Even if you plan on building a large website, it may be prudent to start out with a one page website along with a link from another website. Assuming the Google "sandbox" is still in effect, a one page site will get search engines in the habit of checking your website and getting on the search engine index.
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