6 Steps to Setting up Your First Web Site
by Colleen Happ

Business owners who are setting up their first web site often have similar questions about the basics of setting up a web site. This article will try to answer those questions and give you a head start on establishing an awesome web presence for your company.

1. Register a Domain Name
The first step to setting up a web site is to decide upon a domain name. The domain name is the address of your web site (i.e. mycompanyname.com or .ca). There is a large amount of names registered every day on the web, and the name you want may not be available. To check if the name you want is available or not, you can go to http://www.clickhost.net/domains.php. Even if your domain name is taken, you can try contacting the current owner, who may be willing to sell it for the right price.

Try not to make the address to long, avoid hyphens and try to make it memorable. It should also match your company or product name. The availability of .com (standing for commerce) domain names are decreasing, so don’t be afraid to use .ca (Canada), .net or .usa suffixes.

The cost for registration varies from approximately $10-$30 per year, but it is less if you pay for a longer period.

2. Hosting
Hosting is basically the rental of server space from a hosting company to store your web site. How much you pay for this depends on how much space you need. A typical small business will need less than 20Mbytes of space (depending on the number of images your site has).

Here's how to calculate how much you need – A typical web page size is about 100KB. Multiply the number of pages you will want times 100 KBs each, and you have the amount of disk space needed.
Example: 11 pages x 100 KB each = 1100 KB or 1.1 MB
You can always upgrade if your site grows in the future and you need more space.

Another consideration when purchasing a hosting package is the bandwidth required by your site. If your site will have large files that your customer will download (i.e. large PDF files or MP3s), you will need a much larger bandwidth than a company that just has an informative web site.

Shop around, you will find a large range of prices for basically the same service. The bottom line is that you shouldn’t pay more than $6/month for a small business site.

The need for ecommerce, databases, security, and how you will upload and maintain your site should be considered when you are choosing the hosting package. Check with your chosen hosting company to see if they will meet all of your website needs before purchasing.

3. Decide Who your Target Audience Is
This is the most important question that will determine the success of your web site. Knowing who your audience is, and keeping this in mind throughout the design process will help ensure a successful site.

Once you determine who your customer is, you can determine the best type of site to reach them. Will it be a strictly informative site, an e-commerce site or brochure-ware? What does your customer need in order to buy your ideas or product? Why would they visit your web site?

4. Deciding the Look and feel of Your Site
The look and feel of your site will be largely dependant on knowing who your target audience is (point number 3). Knowing who your target audience is will help you answer questions like “What should I put on the home page?” and “What colors should I use?”

Anyone can design a web site, but not everyone can design a professional looking web site. If you want to do it yourself, you will have to invest a fair amount of time into graphics and html training to give your site a professional look. Graphics, cascading style sheets and JavaScript are harder than they look, but if you have the time and commitment to learn, you can do it yourself. HTML* software tools like FrontPage or Dreamweaver will help you construct your site and graphics tools like Adobe Photoshop will help you construct the graphics.

Web designer rates vary from $35/hour to over $100/hour, and if you can afford it, hiring a professional designer could help you save money in the long run. Shop around to find a designer that shares your vision for your site, can deliver on time and that you connect with.

The small business owner may also consider buying a template and inputting their own information to get the site they want at a reasonable cost. You could get a design company to design a unique template, or pursue a less expensive option and purchase a generic template over the web. The disadvantages of using generic templates is that they are not very flexible, and there may be many other companies on the web that could have bought the same template so their site will have the look as yours.

5.Promoting Your Site
This is another cost that must be budgeted for. If you want to do it yourself, you will need to budget time to do it properly. If not, you can pay one of the many search engine optimization firms out there to promote your site. A great resource for doing it yourself is Search Engine Optimization: 7 Easy Steps for the Small Business Owner.

6 .Other
Other factors that you should consider are:
- What kind of security you need for the site (security issues should be discussed with the web hosting company.)
- Uploading content. Who is going to keep the site current (so your customers will keep coming back), and how will these updates be made? Some hosting companies offer a free FTP** upload service to update your web site. Or they may allow you to update using FrontPage or Dreamweaver. Alternatively, you can purchase an FTP program such as CUTEFTP or COCOFTP for about $40US.

*HTML stands for hypertext mark up language.
**FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol

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