Owning a business website used to be pretty easy. Now, it is an ever changing and swiftly morphing endeavor. In a few short years, building a website has moved from straight html to server side applications, database powered sites and "cloud computing" technologies. Add to that, the necessity for a blog, Twitter, Facebook and … the next great idea for promoting your site. Whatever that may be.
In today's business economy you can't afford to let your website languish. You need a navigator to help guide your site to success in the web world.
Aspects ranging from domain registration, hosting, and ecommerce will be discussed here, in addition to security and web design for traditional and newer hand-held devices. "The Compass" is designed to help you navigate some of the turbulent waters on the Internet and get your business where it's going on the web.
A website requires multiple items to work together seamlessly and in conjunction in order to keep the site functioning as expected. It's not unlike buying a house. Part of the process is below:
* The Deed
* The Map
* The Address
* The Lock
* Curbside Appeal
The Deed
Registering a domain name is like purchasing the deed to a house. It declares to the world that this piece of property, this domain, belongs to you and that no one else in the world can own it for as long as you do.
Domains are renewable from 1 year to 10 years at a time. If your registration lapses, your website and all of its functions including email, shopping and visibility on the web will be unavailable until the registration is renewed. If the registration is allowed to lapse for more than sixty (60) days, your domain could be sold to another party, meaning you would lose ownership and all control of it.
The Map
Nameservers are, for the most part, the backbone of the Internet. They are the map, or GPS in current technology, that tells other machines and visitors how to find your site. The nameservers are set where you registered your domain name and are necessary to make the third segment of domain names work.
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Marketing Your Website
Simply building a website generally is not sufficient to drive traffic to it or generate business from it. Building a website and building a loyal following or a customer base are different things entirely. Your site, at the construction phase, should use standard procedures of good content, keywords and meta tags as part of the original build, or revamping of the site. There are other techniques we use to enhance the marketability of your site, but the construction and these techniques do not constitute a marketing plan, nor much more than a marketing start for your site.
You, as the business owner, know best who your target market should be. A business and marketing plan for a website should be as focused and as detailed as a marketing plan for a traditional brick and mortar business. Just saying “Everyone could use this” does not provide enough information to market the site. Driving traffic to your site should not be the primary goal. Driving quality traffic should be. This will require some direction from you, some input from your experts and most likely, some feedback from your potential market.
In most cases, the price to design and build the site does not include any ongoing efforts at marketing or promoting. This is generally best handled as a separate phase from the build phase due to differing focus of attention and generally different qualifications and specializations.
Web Traffic: "More please"
"If you build it, they will come" is the famous catch phrase, the whole crux of the movie "Field of Dreams". Many years ago, the same could be said of websites. This is no longer true; not only will they not come, only your closest family and friends will ever be able to find you amongst all the other dot coms or dot nets.
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letmein
My current vocation is that of tech support manager for an ISP. As such, I spend a good portion of my days retrieving or resetting passwords for customers for their email, for FTP access to their websites, for admin access to their hosting control panel…
Frequently, the responses for desired passwords are astounding.
"How about '12345'", I'm asked. Or "just set it to password for now, and I'll change it later", I hear. Neither request gets honored. Nor do requests for "qwerty", "fido", "success", or something like "sept1953", at least not in those forms.
In today's online world, the sanctity of your data and your personal information is often no more secure than the strength of your passwords. Yes, that's plural. A single password for your banking, your news, your email and your computer logon is akin to leaving a key to your front door under the welcome mat and a list of your valuables taped to it.
Why the emphasis on multiple, strong passwords? Suppose, someone whose integrity is somewhat tarnished, or more likely, an automated piece of software written by that person, were to discover that your email password was "letmein." No worries, right? After all, it's only email.
What kind of information could someone get from reading your email? Well, possibly the name of the bank you use. So, armed with your email address, and the password to your email, the obvious next step is to call up the homepage of your bank and attempt to log in with your email address and the compromised password. Would they get in? In too many instances, the answer is yes. And to the sites you pay your utilities on, the lists you subscribe to, the domains you may own or manage, your mortgage company…
For an interesting look at how secure your passwords might be (or might not be), check out the neat little app I found at http://onlinepasswordgenerator.net/test-your-password.php. I have a couple that scored in the 6-7 million year range and, unfortunately, a couple that scored in the 6-7 month range. Test yours and see how you do.
I found this chart extremely englightening:
Most common passwords and the time it would take to brute force them :
- password—1 minute, 13 seconds
- letmein—2 seconds
- 12345678—less than one second
- qwerty—less than one second
- charlie—2 seconds
- monkey—less than one second
- 123abc—less than one second
—onlinepasswordgenerator.net
If nothing else, visit their home page the next time you need a password and let their random generator create one for you. Keep your info and your data secure.
Yet to come, a review on various password managers.
Web Hosting
-- Michael Raymond
How much space do you need for your website?
As a rough calculation a novel of 150,000 words, at an average of 6 letters per word will equal about a megabyte of space. In other words, unless the text on your site is as prolific as Isaac Asimov or William Shakespeare, you will probably never need more than 1Gb of storage for just text.
Obviously though, websites today, especially corporate and ecommerce sites are not just text. They have PDF files, pictures, databases, online catalogs, video and much, much more. Each of these types of files will require more space than just text, with video and sometimes databases being the largest gobblers of disk space.
In addition, if you use a webmail or browser based interface to your email, those emails that you leave on the server will be figured into your total disk space used. A bigger impact from email is usually in terms of traffic, or bandwidth used, and you may find, if not now, in the near future, that the bandwidth cost you more to maintain than the hard drive space.
The best advice I can offer is this: if you're not doing ecommerce, start with whatever entry level site your chosen hosting company provides, but avoid the free ones. These are generally cluttered with ads that you have little or no control over. If you find this is too small for either your content or traffic, move up to the next level.
If you are doing ecommerce, you should be more concerned with traffic and bandwidth usage than disk space. You need whatever size hosting package will allow you to install an SSL Certificate, a shopping cart, all the images and descriptions of your products, etc., plus give you some room to grow. Most likely, something mid-tier range from your host will be sufficient. And if not, good news for you!
Ask your host about uptime of their machines and their network. Ask them about backups for data. Ask them about frequency of updates to their systems and their software. All of these questions -- and their answers -- will mean more to your ecommerce venture than the size of your disk.
Web Wizardry
-- Michael Raymond
Once upon a time in a land called "Internet", there were few inhabitants and only a handful of places for those few inhabitants to visit. In this strange and mysterious land, most information was shared in a relatively new language called HTML.
Whole libraries of information, called websites, were delivered to your computer faster than any of the big three delivery guys can deliver packages, even now.
There were a few bastions of wizards fluent in HTML located throughout this land and the number of wizards, for a time, was greater than the number of mortal inhabitants.
One of the strongest enclaves of wizards in Internet was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. These wizards listened to the discontent of the inhabitants around them and decided to assist if they could. Internet, it seems, prior to the wizards getting involved, was a land all but devoid of pictures—with only text, which proved to be rather boring and monotonous. This group of wizards … …More….
