July, 2001 Diablo Blue Page 11
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Building Your Web Site... |
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people to other sites of interest, be sure to check them on a regular basis.
Once you come up with answers to the major issues, come a ton of smaller ones and each one could add considerably to your ongoing expenses. As you hit each item, note them down as when it comes time to talk to a host provider for your web site, you will need to see if they can support that and at what cost.
Do you want a private area for your customers? This could be as simple as a separate web area not available from your main web pages or one that requires a user id and password to access.
Do you want a secure area for your customers? How much do you really want to keep other people and hackers out of this area.
Will you be selling products on the web using an online shopping basket approach? If so, we get into credit arrangements and banking issues to ensure payments are collected before your goods go out the door.
Do you want to give your customers access to your data files and databases on the web? This gets into the real of online databases and security becomes a major issue and expense.
Will you be making files and downloadable documents available on the web? Files can get to be quite large and time consuming to download via dial up access and this also increases the space required for your web site at an additional cost.
Will you be collecting personal or business information from people on the web? There are things like guest books and information pages that collect such information even to the point of setting up "cookies" to keep track of where people have been and what they last looked at.
Do you want to be able to show video clips, sound, and movies on the web? This also adds to the size of the web site and the need to make content small enough to download at dial up speeds. You will probably also have to put in links to pages that provide the players for what ever type of content you will be including so that people will be able to look at the clips.
If you haven't already done so, be sure to start looking at web sites out there that have the type of information and content that you want to provide. You want your site to be eye appealing as well as full of useful content for your customers.
So now that you are committed, or should be, getting started is actually pretty easy.
The first thing to do is to come up with your dot com name. This exercise should really be done on paper before hand and I would suggest you come up with your ideal name and then a long list of alternatives. With as many sites out there already, you may find your choices are very limited. The easy way of course to see if it is taken or not is to simply get connected to the internet, fire up the browser, and then tell it to look for www.yourfavoritename.com and see if it exists. You do have some alternatives if the name you really want is not available. One is to see if .org, or .net is taken, another is to look for another country code might work for you. How about www.yourfavoritename.tv? Many countries will allow you to use the name with their high level domain for a fee and usually, those fees are very reasonable. My advise though is to stick with the dot com, dot net, dot org, or one of the new dot names coming out that are licensed by ICANN, the internet policing agency. There are a number of web sites out there that will tell you if any of these names are available and what I usually do is to go to Network Solutions, www.networksolutions.com and check through them. If you do find a name available, then by all means, get it locked in and buy the name. The cost will be usually $70 for two years.
The next thing to do is to select a host site to "host" your web name. I have done considerable research on this and have found that www.hostway.com out of the Chicago area, is very com