Tech Talk: Your Own Web Site

By Dave Rutledge

No matter if you are a first time or experienced user set up of a website can be a large amount of planning and groundwork. There can be many costs such as programs to make the site graphics, not to mention the talent required to run the programs and create the graphics.

Site layout is an important consideration that few spend much time on, as the thought pattern is if you can use the site you created then everyone should be able to, which isn’t always true.

Knowledge of current web standards and coding can be overwhelming for the first time or experienced user, and is time consuming to learn. Website set up can leave people frustrated and turn into a general bad experience for the do it yourself type of person.

With all this in effect you should consider hiring a professional web design company to take care of all the needs of your website, and in the end reap the rewards of a fast and effective solution.

For the average person who is looking to create a blog (meaning web log, a diary or personal page on the internet) there are mountains of free hosting services that offer the ability to do so with little or no cost. These services usually range from allowing you to have a blog under a web identity that’s part of a large site overall, to allowing your blog to run unique under a sub domain name. All of these services are considered personal use, and are far from reliable and should not be considered for business or anything but personal use. Some of the common trade offs and draw backs of having a free hosting account are advertising banners and pop up ads that are controlled by the hosting provider, and not you. The free templates offered by such services offer no copyright or originality to you, and are used by thousands of people all over the world. Also despite claims of high offers of bandwidth for free a lot of these free providers have limited or shared bandwidth. With this limited amount of bandwidth you will see a cut off screen telling your users that your have gone over limit for the month.

When looking at websites for anything besides personal use, unless you know how to do it yourself, the first step you are looking at is finding the designer.

Finding a reliable and professional design company is worth it as they will help get your website running from concept to completion. A design company’s staff should have years of experience in the field and code to current web standards. The design company should of course have some sort of professional website of their own. When looking at the design company look at their portfolio or ask to see existing sites to see working examples of their previous work. Furthermore in the web design field a design company must have strong customer relations and supports, reliable customer service, and reasonable site maintenance policies.

Your design company should provide for web hosting at a competitive cost, along with domain name and DNS services.

When looking at hosting needs you must remember that the cost may vary on the requirements that need to be met, and the design company should provide different hosting options to reflect such difference of needs. The site host should be running premium Canadian bandwidth to better meet the needs of your target audience.

Some large dynamic sites could need requirements like server side codes such as PHP or ASP, or databases such as SQL or MySQL, and your design company should plan out these requirements and have them met. The hosting should also come with reliable web statistics to show you the patterns and behaviours of your user base. Along with hosting should come the option of running your own personal email that ties with your domain name, and would look something like yourname@yourdomain.com, this email should have POP3 (IMAP, etc) and webmail abilities.

Your design company should market your site after site launch, and incorporate keywords and phrases relevant to your specific needs. During marketing the design company should analyze your site statistics and determine course of direction with use or change of keywords. As part of marketing your design company should submit your site to search engines, links exchanges, and Internet directories relevant to your site activities. Your design company should offer further marketing services at additional costs such as maintenance of paid advertising campaigns.

Dave Rutledge is the owner of Dreamlab Digital Design Studios.   250-961-0932

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