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So you want a Website
There are 3 basic steps you need to take to create a website. Here is an explanation of these steps and a guideline to what the costs would be. If you prefer a hands-off approach I can do all this for you, however I prefer you as the owner of the site do the registration and hosting setup with your own account information and credit card. I can guide you through these steps if you need guidance. This leaves you in control of your site.
- Registrar - Registry of the domain name with a Registrar. The registrar is the company that registers the domain name (mywebsite.com) you want to use. All they are really doing is keeping the record of your domain and the server it points to. Examples of registrars are godaddy.com
or register.com.
- Hosting - Hosting of the site
with a web hosting company. This company would host your domain
(and email if applicable) on their server. Think of this as
leasing a space on the Internet. The hosting company puts their
server on the Internet and you lease a space to put your files
that make up your website. When someone goes to your website
they are calling the pages (contact.html) and images from this
server. For smaller sites you typically use shared hosting which
means your website along with several others are shared on one
server. This isn’t obvious from anyone visiting your site but it
keeps the cost down as the cost of the server is spread over
several sites. Dedicated hosting is an option but much more
expensive as you are leasing the entire server from the hosting
company. Additionally if you want email that would also get
setup with the web hosting company to allow you to send email
from your domain name. (me@mywebsite.com). This would be a pop
mail account that could either be accessed from webmail or
through an email client like Outlook, Thunderbird, Outlook
Express or Mail.
- Figure $10-20/month for shared web hosting. Some places offer this for as low as $5. Just be careful not to shop only by cost. You get what you pay for and if they having spotty service your website and email may not work all the time.
- Design – The web designer is the one who creates the pages (content) for your website. Most web hosting companies offer basic templates for creating your own pages. This is a fast way to put a site together but doesn’t offer any individuality to your site as anyone else can use that same template. It also gives you less flexibility in how your site will look and be navigated through. Having a web designer create your page from your ideas and vision will give you a unique site unlike anyone else’s. A web designer would use programs like Dreamweaver, Flash or FrontPage to Create the actual content of the website. Additionally the web designer should setup your email if applicable and registering your domain name to search engines which will improve your results in searches with sites like Google or Yahoo. Along with registering your site with search engines they should also add Meta data tags to your web pages and a sitemap and robot.txt file if there are areas you don’t want searched on your site.
- The cost varies depends on site layout, number of pages and graphics used, including if the design has to be created from scratch or some layout, data and graphics will be provided. Email will also be a factor depending on the number of email addresses that are needed and how they are setup. A rule of thumb is $500-$1,200 as a base price and $75 for every page on the site. If going with a template from the hosting company this part is free if you don’t count your time to set it up.
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