Design & Host your website
Lesson 6: Design & Host your website
Lesson 6:
In the earlier chapters of this course, you have already learnt the basics of
internet marketing, about how to create your own products, how to draw your
business plan and about designing your website.
Since you know what your website should look like, it is good if you start
creating it right now. If you are a software programmer or know little about
software, then you will find it very easy to directly work on HTML files. If you have
no experience in any software, to save your time and money we have more than
300 readymade web pages for you your CD.
We recommend you to use some wysiwyg (What You See Is What You Get)
text editors like MS Word (you need to create a file and save as html) or MS
Publisher or something similar to those and modify the readymade web pages
(templates) to suit your requirements.
Once you are familiar with html files (may be in a week) open your CD for the
legal version of advanced html generator. This software is very powerful and will
help you create html files from scratch or to edit an existing file.
It is available free-of-cost (as of now) on the internet, but is not widely known. If
you go to buy similar software in the market you will end-up paying not less than
Rs. 3,000/- They have a comprehensive web tutorial that covers every aspect of
the software. The author (or owner) is definitely an open-minded, generous
person.
In addition to the readymade web pages, we have provided free online books
to learn advanced techniques of HTML programming, some advanced html tools,
scripts and CGI files that will be useful to you. You are free to use them as you
wish.
Register your domain name
You need to register Domain names (i.e. Website URL) with the companies
called"domain registrars". You can get a list of such companies at
http://www.ICANN.org/. You can register your domain name by paying in advance
for 1 year up to 10 years.
You will find that the companies may charge anywhere between $9 and $30
per year perdomain (.com / .net / .org). Often you will find some companies
offering domain names for as low as $3. Before you take any decision to register
with them check the offer thoroughly. You will be surprised to see the shortfalls.
When you compare the prices, you must compare for 1 year, 2 years as well as for
10 years.
Another important thing to remember is, when you pay and register the
domain, your name should be listed as the owner as well as the technical contact.
You should have the full control of your domain. You should be able to select your
preferred hosting company. No way should you get trapped because of the low
cost. Remember, when you start promoting your website, the domain name is your
biggest asset. You should never give a chance for anyone to claim a stake on it.
There is a trade secret about domain registration. There are thousands of
marketers around the world who invest time, effort and money to promote their
websites to pull the traffic. Later on, some of them change their focus on
something else or for some reason they leave their site active and move to some
other business. Though they stop promoting actively, the auto-marketing systems
they had placed, keeps getting the traffic in.
In such situations, when the registration for such domain names expires, the
owners sometimes forget to renew or they decide to stop it. Even after expiry of
the domains, the efforts they had put-in earlier still bring traffic to the site.
Identify and register such domain names immediately and then either build a
website or just redirect the domain name to your existing website. Simply enjoy the
fruit of others labor, which otherwise would have been wasted. Please
understand that you are not stealing others business. We have seen few such
companies providing this service.
Hosting your website
Hosting is nothing but keeping all your files and placing the domain on a
computer called server. Once your website is hosted on a server, it becomes
available for the world to browse.
You must have heard about UNIX / Linux and Windows NT servers. If you are
not a software programmer, you must be wondering about the operating system
on which to host your website. Actually it does not matter which operating system
you are using at home. You can host your website on any platform i.e. UNIX /
Linux / Windows NT.
Hosting on UNIX / Linux server is cheaper, faster and reliable in the security
point of view, as compared to Windows NT server. However hosting companies
prefer Windows NT server due to availability of support during critical breakdown,
in spite of its heavy cost.
But never get fooled by the Free Hosting. Free hosting has lot many
disadvantages. You will not have your own address like www.YourName.com.
Instead, your web address would be www.FreeHosingCompany.com/YourName.
Once you start your business, you will put lots of efforts to bring-in visitors.
What if the hosting company restricts your traffic or the company closes down? On
the internet, changing the domain name / website address is as good as starting a
new business.
Additionally, the (free) hosting company may display advertisements on your
website. You could lose your customers to your competitors due to the
advertisements on free website that you do not have control over. You could even
lose the income that you could have made from displaying advertisements on your
website.
If you want to grow big in your online business, choose to go for your own
website with paid hosting. We have listed few of such reliable companies on your
CD. You will find them very cost effective and reliable.
Test, test and test
You have planned well, designed a good website and you have hosted it using
a very reliable web hosting company. However, all these can prove to be useless
until your site is actually working, the way you designed it. If you want to create a
successful website, you need to test, test and test again.
Albert Einstein once said, No problem can be solved from the same level
of consciousness that created it. Ask a few of your friends to browse your site
and, if possible, watch them silently as they do this. Remember that if at any stage
you feel like explaining them, then there is some problem. Take note of it and
analyze later.
You will be surprised at the number of mistakes you have committed. Some
times what you wrote might convey altogether a different message to the visitor,
which you cannot even imagine. Such mistakes can be rectified only when a third
person checks it.
Ask them to check colours & size of fonts (readability), graphics, all the links in
the website, contents (and what it means to them), time taken to open the website
(with slowest possible computer and modem), with different operating systems (if
you are using Windows XP, check with Windows 98 and others), with different
browsers (Old and new versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Firefox,
Opera, etc.) and with different display settings (640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 and
different colour-settings).
Ask them to browse your website as if they read some advertisement and have
come to your website to search that information. And ask them whether they got
what they were looking for.
You need to rectify everything before you actively promote your website. If your
visitors find any mistake in your website, you will loose the credibility. Failure to
ensure website quality might cost you thousands of rupees in terms of wastage of
time & money on website redesigns and lost customers. Testing a website is
certainly a long and tedious task, but it's the most important task of all.
Lesson 6: Design & Host your website