Are you interested in finding out how to bring your company in on the World Wide Web? Or are you interested in developing an online business, but not sure how? Establishing an online presence is very important to giving your company legitimacy and to easily share information with potential clients. This page contains some general information to help familiarize you with the steps to having a website.
Domain Name: The first step is deciding on and registering a domain name. This is the name that will be promoted to the public. It needs to be rememberable and it needs to fit the business. It is an essential component of a professional website. There is an alarming number of domain names that have been registered, so oftentimes a first-choice is not available. However, there are still plenty of names unregistered.
Web Hosting: Once a domain name is registered, it is "parked." That means that typing the name into a browser will not go to a website. It will go to either an error page or a "registered here" page. To have the name go to a website, it must have Web Hosting. When you navigate to a website, just like this one, the pages that display in your web browser are stored on servers across the globe. Web Hosting gives you a place to store your web pages so that people on the Internet can access them.
Web Design: This is the actual creation and design of what a website will look like and what contents it will have. This is what your clients and potential clients will see. Web Design encompasses the appearance of a website, the navigation, and the functionality.
Web Applications: These are functions of a site that interact with the visitor. For example, a shopping cart system is an example of a web application. Another example is the script I wrote to control what you see whenever you click the "setup an appointment" link. For example, this, this, and this are different based on what information is sent in the link. This allows you to customize the way people can respond to you. There is another example in the script that runs my example hosting site. I created the system that Sohomax uses as a shopping system from scratch. Basically, if you want your site to react to the visitor, I can create a custom solution for you.
Site Promotion: The Field of Dreams quote, "If you build it, they will come" does not apply to the Internet. A step that cannot be overlooked is optomizing your website for the main search engines. Each main engine has different methods of ranking their pages, and you have to submit to each of them in a format that is most favorable to that engine. Search engine ranking has become quite a science in the web community. It is not easy to get high rankings, but it can be done.
Ok, ok, how much? The short answer... that depends. The long answer is that depending on what you want your site to do, how many pages you want, and how much work will be involved in the job will determine the price. Please setup an appointment to discuss what you need and what type of price range you will be looking at.
I can tell you a couple costs...these are costs that I don't really have control over:
Domain Registration - $13.50/yr
Web Hosting - $10.00/mo or $100.00/yr
