The Simple Facts of Life….Online!!
Getting a site online is not as difficult a task as many people make it out to be. It is a simple matter of knowing what you want, and not getting confused by all the jargon. All you ultimately need is a clear idea of what you want to put out there, and let us deal with the rest.
Content & Design
As with print media, content and design are dealt with as two separate entities. In the newspaper business, the journalists do the stories, or content, and the typesetters and layout specialists deal with the design.
In the case of your website, you are the journalist, and your primary role will be the content of the site. Without the stories, there is no newspaper to layout!!
The initial step here is to decide on the content, rather than writing it, and break down your ideas into categories. The typical categories are Home Page, About Us, Location, Testimonials etc.
Then, after you have a clear cut idea of what the content is going to be, you can decide how it might look laid out on the screen, or you can leave it all to us, and then make suggestions based on what we provide. Ultimately, you are the journalist and the chief editor.
Domain Name
Anotherr onsideration to take into account is that of Domain Name and email addresses. After you have decided what you would like as a domain name, we will check to see if it is available. It might be worth thinking of maybe two or three in case your initial choice is not available.
For example, our first choice of domain for our site was www.templeweb.com, but unfortunately, that was not available. So, we took www.temple-web.com, as well as www.templeogueweb.com, and just in case anyone entered the actual company name, we also too www.templeoguewebservices.com.
Even though we have those three domain name, they all point point to the one place.
Finally, consider what you want as email addresses, and how you intend to retrieve them. For example info@yourDomain.ie, forwarded to yourcompany@gmail.com, from where you can respond to emails using the yourDomain.ie email address.
Hosting
This is where it gets technical and where we come in. In a nutshell, hosting is what stores your website and emails on the internet. For most basic users, the safest thing is to leave that to us, but for the more adventurous, we offer full cPanel hosting. For more information on our hosting plans, click here…
Check List
- Decide on your content
- Choose a domain name
- Pick you email addresses
- Decide if we look after your hosting administration (advised for the majority) , or we provide you with the ability to manage it yourself.
So, we have covered all the basics of how to approach getting your website built. Now see our guide on how to go about writing content here…