Websites Explained
Why do I need a website?
One very simple answer is because you can bet that your competition has one!
Websites allow you to advertise your goods and services for a fraction of the price of other traditional forms of advertising. A website has the potential to be viewed by a far greater amount of people than a paper advert, radio advert etc…
A website can be your best employee; a website does not sleep, require holidays, is never sick and costs a lot less to employee than a member of staff. A website also has a single topic of conversation, your company, that’s all it talks about.
What makes up a website?
A website needs some very essential parts to be created, from design and coding to hosting and search engine optimisation, hopefully the following will give you an insight into what is required to get your products onto the world wide web…
Domain Name – This is the address where your site will be, a lot of companies try to get a website which is the same as their company name, an example is Daves Foods is a company and his company web address is www.davesfoods.co.uk Domains do not have to mirror the company name and can be targeted at the products that you sell, for example Daves Foods sells iced buns, instead of having www.davesfoods.co.uk they might want www.icedbuns.co.uk
A company can purchase as many domains as they want, Design Monkey will be able to find a domain and purchase it on your behalf. Pricing should start at between £3 to £5.
Hosting – A websites needs a place to live, this is called hosting. Hosting is provided by hosting farms, which have direct connections to the backbone of the internet and have 100’s of servers running 1000’s of websites on them. All good hosting is managed and should come with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
With a good hosting package you should also receive unlimited email addresses which can be used by the company.
Design – There are two different types of designs to use, firstly there is a template design. This is where you choose the template for your website from a selection provided by your web design agency. These sites are usually cheaper as no development time is needed, but the downside is that your site might look like others. Secondly, there are custom, bespoke sites, which are designed by a web developer to the customers exact standards. The advantage of this is that the site will be unique and will allow the customer to exercise their own creative ideas.
Coding – Once a design has been finalised it will need to be ‘cut up’. This is the process of coding the design into a fully functional website. There are different types of coding, either based on Linux (php) or Windows (asp). Design Monkey codes in php.
Once the site has been ‘cut up’ the code will be imported into either an e-commerce (dmCOMMERCE) or a CMS (Content Management System) (dmCMS), which will allow the customer to make their own changes.
Maintenance & Development – All sites will need maintenance and development from time to time. If you purchase a website with a CMS a lot of this work can be carried out by the customers. Development work might be to add new functionality to the website.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - A website needs to be found and SEO is used to advertise your site to all the web users. SEO is based on the content of your site, what you sell and of course how many search engines that you register with. SEO should be a long term investment and you should be aware when people say they can get you onto the top of Google for just a few hundred pounds. Yes, they are correct they can do this, but for how long, in our experience not long and you may get penalised by Google later on.