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So You Want to Have a Website? |
There are many reasons why an individual or
business would want to have a website. Three spring to mind:
- Print advertising is loosing its effectiveness.
- Print advertising is very expensive relative to web
advertising.
- You can build a presence on the web out of all proportion to
your size.
How do you decide how to proceed? To some
extent you get what you pay for, but and it is a very big but, costs and levels of service vary wildly. A .co.uk domain costs about £2.50 + VAT a
year from a reputable provider and £20 + VAT per year from another. This is
just for owning the domain not for hosting or anything else.
Hosting is another minefield. To start with
you will probably be using some sort of shared hosting. Some website designers include a years hosting
for nothing while some hosts charge hundreds of pounds per year. How many email
addresses are you allowed by your host: the range can be from zero to
unlimited. How secure is your data? Is your data backed up daily? What about offsite
backups? Is the hardware failsafe? If there is a catastrophic hardware failure
how long will it take to get your site back online? The answers to these
questions really matter. If your
site is down for several days your business can suffer badly.
Then there is the site itself. You could
create it yourself if you feel able but that may well be a mistake. There are
many pitfalls. Your designer may create a site for you and walk away leaving
you to do any updates. The site may look nice but not show up in the main
search engines. Improving the site's search engine ranking is influenced by the
site design and content as well as any incoming links. An unchanging site will
fall in the rankings over time and visitors will start to see the site as
stale.
If you can form a long term relationship
with a designer who will undertake updates and site redesigns while keeping
your aims and priorities in mind it will save money in the long run.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 18 December 2006 )
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