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Creating a basic SOHO website
Posted in: Business to Business, blog by CW on 19 August 2010
- Image via Wikipedia
I was recently speaking with the owner of the restaurant where I go for breakfast during the week. He’s interested in setting up a website for his restaurant but has no experience with that sort of thing. I assured him that he wasn’t alone, many owners of small and home businesses lack experience at putting together a website and usually turn to a professional or talented friend or family member to do that for them. He understands the benefits of having a site and has some good ideas about what he’d like to feature on it.
I don’t claim to be a professional web designer. What I do claim is years of experience with setting up a domain and adapting WordPress templates to meet my needs. Because I’m not a rich corporation my overall goal is to do as big a job as I can on as small an investment as possible. Besides saving me money, building my own sites has also taught me a lot about HTML and CSS and gives me a feeling of control that having a professionally maintained site wouldn’t.
Since this project hasn’t yet begun I thought it might make for an interesting series of blog entries: Website design on the cheap from day 1.
Before you can start doing anything about a website you need to register a domain name, preferably one that reflects your business name. Unique domain names are getting harder to find for a .com domain so you may need to investigate what’s available for .co or maybe even a domain like .us. If your business name ends in “us” or “co” this could be an ideal solution. There are other domains that might apply to your type of business, like .biz, .org or .tv. To see if the name and extension (.org or .co, etc.) you want is available, go to the homepage of any domain name registrar to check. Registrars like godaddy.com and 1and1.com allow you to freely check the availability of domain names and if the one you want is available, they’ll also offer you web space on which you can build a website for your new domain. These packages (domain name+web space) are not expensive. We pay approximately $10 a month for our domain package.
Once you’ve decided on a domain name you need to decide which package works best for the site you want to build. Do you want to sell items on your site? Then you should look at business packages that come with “shopping cart” functionality built-in. This will save you a lot of time and effort trying to incorporate payment methods and SSH (secure shell access, also known as “https://…”) into your site.
Do you want an informational site only, no selling or need for secure access? Then many home or personal packages may be just fine.
No matter what sort of site you plan to build, the package you select should contain a few basic and necessary items: only consider a plan that offers at least one PostgreSQL or MYSQL database, ftp access (file transfer protocol, necessary for uploading files to your website) and email so you can have a yourname@yoursite.com email address. In the business world it’s more professional to have an email address on your domain than to have an AOL, Hotmail or even Gmail address. Look over the list of benefits to each type of plan the different registrars offer and pick the one that provides the features you need at a price you can comfortably afford.
So now you have a name reserved for your domain and a host for your website. In the next installment we’ll roll up our sleeves, go template hunting and learn all about the file transfer protocol.
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