I’m not trying to put web designers out of [...]]]> If you’ve already approached a web-designer and asked them about prices, you’ll have already heard ‘What do you want it to do?’  Having thought about it and told them, you probably picked yourself up off the floor after they told you how much it will cost!

I’m not trying to put web designers out of business here.  If you need an all singing, all dancing, visual extravaganza with fully functioning shopping cart, forum and blog with the minimum of fuss and you need your site to be unique in design and style, then you are probably going to have to pay them the rate they asked for (and if this is the case you would do well to approach Stylistic Web Design Ltd)!

If your initial thoughts are something a bit more basic; some static pages to get across key, useful bit of information about your company, who you are, what you do, maybe a blog, etc. then, if you are willing to do some reading and have a play about with technology, there are a couple of possible solutions for you.

You could use a What You See Is What You Get (WISIWYG) web-site development tool, such as FrontPage (2003 was the last version released, it was replaced by Expression Web) or Dream Weaver.  These are off the shelf packages, similar to Word or Excel.  They can be quite simple to use but the main downside is the cost.  My quick internet comparisons put Expression Web at £150 and DreamWeaver at £250.  They can also require a bit of technical know-how.

But another possible solution is Open Source Content Management.  Sounds a right mouthful doesn’t it?  But, in essence, it a framework onto which you can build.  Being open source, means there are literally thousands of developers around the world working on improving and adding bits onto the basic package for free.  They may be developing for their own needs but they make the fruits of their labour available to everyone.

Free doesn’t mean cheap and nasty looking either.  There are a number of these Open Source Content Management systems out there.  By far the most common is WordPress (found at www.wordpress.org/).  They describe themselves like this;

“WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.”

WordPress is used by many leading organisations.  Downing Street (www.number10.gov.uk/), Ford (autoshows.ford.com), The Wall Street Journal (magazine.wsj.com) and Richard Branson (entrepreneur.virgin.com) all use it, so there must be something in it, right?

Many hosts may also include it as a ‘1-click’ install on your hosting package, greatly simplifying the install procedure and getting you up and running quickly.

You can download ‘themes’ to change the look and feel of the site and also ‘plug-ins’ to add or enhance functionality.  Once you get a feel for it and if you are prepared to do a bit of reading and learning, you can edit these to ‘tweak’ them for your specific site or develop your own from scratch.

This site uses WordPress.  It uses a ‘tweaked’ theme (the standard, free one wasn’t quite what Sara wanted…) and a number of additional plug-ins to control things like e-mail subscriptions, spam monitoring, Google Analytics and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Total monetary cost to Sara – £0.00 – just a bit of time and (my!) effort.

A bespoke web site with similar functionality from a web designer?  Somewhere in the region of £5-6000!

So hopefully the posts in this series have opened your eyes to how you can produce a web site for your business.  At the end of the day the most difficult thing to come up with are ideas… that’s why professional web design studios cost so much…

If you would like Above Parr PA Services to help you create your web presence, contact Sara.

As with everything, the best one is probably a recommended one.  If you haven’t got a recommendation then the internet can be a valuable resource as long as your research is structured.  Jump on and type [...]]]> There are as many hosts as there are stars in the night sky!  How can you choose one?

As with everything, the best one is probably a recommended one.  If you haven’t got a recommendation then the internet can be a valuable resource as long as your research is structured.  Jump on and type ‘web hosting’ into a search engine.  For me that only returned 225 MILLION hits!

Look at a few pricing structures.  Some will offer ‘Unlimited disk space’ (read file storage).  Some will offer ‘Unlimited Bandwidth’ (read amount of data that can be transferred to/from your site).  Some will offer packages that give a fixed amount of one or the other or both.  There are price/option decisions to be made at this point, but most hosts should be flexible enough to allow you to swap pricing/features plan.  Think about where you want your files hosted.  They can be anywhere in the world.  This is technology and everything is done remotely.  In fact your host may well have never even seen the physical hardware they sell space on, or indeed, even own it!

But price isn’t everything.  Think about the downsides as well.  Low cost probably means that you are sharing a server, probably with 10s if not 100s of other companies.  If one of those writes a bit of web code that isn’t very good, it may tie up your server, causing it to run slowly and take ages to present even the simplest of web sites to your visitor.  Your host should be monitoring this kind of thing, but it’s reactive, you may have already missed that new customer because your site wouldn’t load before they get it fixed.  It’s a trade off.  At some point in time you may need some support.  If the hosting company isn’t in your time zone then questions could take a while to answer.  If the hosting company plans an upgrade ‘out-of-hours’ will it be out of your hours, or right in the middle of your prime web site viewing time?  For these reasons alone it may be worth having your site hosted in your country if possible, not to mention language barriers (trust me, I manage a team split in the UK and India, language and custom is a much larger barrier than everyone says).

So, find a host, and then search for some reviews about them.  Make an informed decision, but it’s not the end of the world if you have issues – you can move your web site quite easily between hosts. For your info Sara was introduced to her host through a networking event – TwentyHost, and is on their Shared UK Hosting Plan.  It gives her site 150MB of storage space (including email storage, but this can me moved off-line), 2.25GB of Bandwidth/month and up to 25 unique email addresses, more than enough, for now.

Once you have your host – link  them to your domain name using the DNS Lookup on your domain control panel.  Your new host should have given you the names of their ‘Names Servers’, you need to enter these into your domain control panel ‘Names Servers’ section.  As if by magic (well, over a couple of days – the internet is a big place you know and word needs to get around!) your domain name is linked to your hosted space.

In my final post in this series I’ll be looking at possible ways of creating some content for your new site.

If you would like Above Parr PA Services to help you create your web presence, contact Sara.

The first thing you’ll need is a ‘domain name’.  This is your address on the internet, your ‘URL’.  You know, ‘www.blahblahblah.com’ or ‘www.thingybob.co.uk’.

Think carefully about the two parts of the address, the ‘blahblahblah’ bit and the [...]]]> In my second installment we’ll look at what you need to get started in the on-line world.

The first thing you’ll need is a ‘domain name’.  This is your address on the internet, your ‘URL’.  You know, ‘www.blahblahblah.com’ or ‘www.thingybob.co.uk’.

Think carefully about the two parts of the address, the ‘blahblahblah’ bit and the extension ‘.com’ or ‘.co.uk’ (or a multitude of others) it can reveal a lot about your company and it’s ambitions.

The first part would ideally be your company name, but the world is a big place and your address (or URL) may already be registered, either to another company with the same name or to someone who has registered the name in the hope of making a fast buck and selling it on at a profit.  You may need to opt for an alternative.  Sites where you register your domain name (for example I always use www.123-reg.co.uk/) will usually do a free search and list some alternatives if your first choice isn’t available.

For the extension, think about what you want to portray.  ‘.com’ is usually seen as a big corporation or global company, think Microsoft.com or IBM.com.  ‘.com’ extensions are relatively expensive however, about £10 per year.  Country extensions, such as ‘.co.uk’ can prove far more cost effective about £3 per year.  Some companies also like to use their extension to show the country they are located in, or a bit of patriotism (the BBC are at bbc.co.uk rather than bbc.com (although they do own bbc.com and it redirects to bbc.co.uk).

This brings me on to redirecting.  You may have one site but want to have several routes into it.  This is easily achievable.  This site is www.aboveparr.co.uk/, but what happens if you enter www.virtuallyeverythingdoneforyou.co.uk/? You end up back here!  Now this alternate address isn’t important, but it’s worth thinking about if you web address may be typed incorrectly or maybe as something for a future marketing campaign.  This should be handled by your host; I’ve not had to do anything ‘clever’ other than link the two addresses.

So, you have your web address(es) what next?  You need a host, someone to hold all your web site files so they are available for everyone to see.  My next entry will be about finding a host and some things to think about before you finally settle on one.

If you would like Above Parr PA Services to help you create your web presence, contact Sara.

Exclamations many a small business will have heard or thought.

OK, in this ever increasing tech-savvy world we live in, an online presence is useful.  I can’t say it isn’t.  With the right content it can answer many people’s [...]]]> Well I MUST… everyone has one don’t they?  My business will fail if I don’t…

Exclamations many a small business will have heard or thought.

OK, in this ever increasing tech-savvy world we live in, an online presence is useful.  I can’t say it isn’t.  With the right content it can answer many people’s basic questions about your business.  It can also act as a marketing tool, a shop window, even a full shop, whatever time of the day or night, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Before I jump in to tell you what could make your life just that little bit easier when it comes to web sites, a little bit about me.  I’ve been professionally involved in technology since I left University in 1993, as a programmer, a web-developer, a project manager and an IT consultant for small IT companies and global multinational corporations.  I’ve worked for a number of clients, private and public sector, usually on long term projects.

For the last 10 or so years I’ve always jumped on the internet at the first opportunity to research anything and everything.  When I moved from London to Nottingham in 1999 it would have been the perfect solution, but web sites were the Tech companies’ domain and sites like RightMove.com didn’t exist then.  I ended up spending valuable ‘downtime’ away from home, trawling around estate agents, looking at house details and booking viewings… (I wish I’d had a PA back then!)

Now almost everyone uses the internet to research just about anything, from houses to holidays, from prices to PAs.

But how do I go about getting a web site?  It’s really complex and expensive isn’t it?

It can be, but it doesn’t have to be.  Over the next few postings I’ll list some options and outline some ‘tips and tricks’ that hopefully can spare you some heartache, but most importantly, for the small, start-up business, save some time and money.

If you would like Above Parr PA Services to help you create your web presence, contact Sara.