Page 12 Diablo Blue July, 2001
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Building Your Web Site... |
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petitive, has a lot of features, is reliable, and at a good value. This is the company that I have used to host my personal web site and my business site. Cost of the host site ranges from $10 per month to over $250 per month depending on features and that is where the list above of features we talked about is important. The $10 site gets you one mail box, limited features, and space for a basic site with limited traffic to the site. This is what I have done with my www.sanbornsoftware.com site. You can look at that and see it is a basic, few frills and features, web site. Additional monthly costs will include multiple mail boxes and accounts, secure site for shopping carts and the like.
When selecting your web host, you need to consider access to it as well. Most host sites, including Hostway, have no dial up access for getting your email and updating your web site so you need to have regular internet access. Now most people, already have internet access from companies such as AOL, Microsoft MSN, Earthlink, or a local internet access provider like I use. This gives me access to the email, internet, and to allow me to update my web pages. But remember, you are paying extra for that access to that provider from usually $20 to $25 per month so when selecting the web host, you might check with your local provider to see what the cost is and if it includes local access. You may find the additional cost of hosting not that much more. Of course, if you are concerned with things like your site being always up and online, you might decide that a larger company is warranted.
Now comes the difficult part of determining content, how extensive the site is to be such as the features discussed above, graphics, and how often it is to be updated.
If you look at some of the splashy web sites out there such as Microsoft, Pepsi, CNN, and ESPN, you will see there is a ton of content, video clips, active buttons, and the like. They are very cool, great to look at, and they cost a bundle to develop and maintain.
My recommendation is to keep it simple. Nothing frustrates someone looking at a web page more than waiting a long time for graphics to download so keep them small. The best size for a graphic is the smallest you can make it and still keep it visible and recognizable. When scanning for the web and building graphics, keep them no more than 90 dpi in resolution size. Also when building your image, be sure to consider that most computers are still looking at images at a screen resolution of 800x600.
The more you can put together in the way of content, graphics, and images, the lower the cost of the project especially if you are using an outside source for development and if you do use an outside source for development, by all means, get copies of everything they do. If things go wrong with that developer, you want to be able to immediately pull the plug and move on to someone else.
Doing the web site yourself can actually be pretty easy with so many tools available today. It seems that every high end word processor, publisher package, and even many of the minor publishing programs will build the web HTML code for you. Tools that I use for web development include for graphics, Paint Shop Pro from Jasc software, and Photoshop from Adobe. For web development, I use Go Live from Adobe. Alternatives are Front Page 2000 from Microsoft, and Page Mill from Adobe. For uploading the finished web products to the host site, any FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program will work and I use WSFTP, available on the web.
Finally, as to cost, developing a web site can be quite expensive if you are having it done with outside help. This is especially true if you depend on the developer to do all the design work, scan images, build graphics, and the like. This type of work can take a long time and can be very expensive. The same holds true if you want them to develop the shopping cart, secure site, passwords, and database information on your site. For these types of features, look at what the host site can provide for you.
More and more companies are doing incredible things on the web from customer relationships management to selling all sorts of products and finding that it really enhances business. Then there are many who have sunk tons of cash into their web sites to only find that no one visits and those that do don't stay long enough to see who you really are and what your business is. That is were the initial planning really pays off in the long run and it should for you and your business.