Establishing a website presence

This article is aimed at anyone who has no website or any previous IT experience and is a quick explanation about what you need to do in order to get a website or internet presence.

Everyone who looks on the internet is looking at web pages, and the first port of call for anyone wanting to establish a web presence is to get a web page. This is a lot easier than you would think, as there are now companies out there who will set you up on the web for as little as £200, with your own web pages and email systems in place.

If you want to do it yourself, the best way of doing it is to purchase a domain name, having found one that you like the look of, and either use free web space or purchase a package which enables you to put pages onto the internet.

The cost of a domain name is about £13 per year, with a reputable domain name supplier like names.co.uk. The cost of a hosting package is about £55 per year, and this again is with http://www.names.co.uk/ (I have no link to names.co.uk and do not profit from this referral).

You go online, purchase your domain name and some web space and within four to five days you will be ready to start creating your web presence.

Creating web pages

This is where things get slightly technical, and as far as I know there are still no real beginner basic ways of producing a web site without knowing a little bit about technical procedures.

There are plenty of free packages that will automatically install themselves in your web space, but in order to get there you need to know how to use the web space.

But this means in that you either have to spend a bit of time learning about something called FTP or you have to look at getting someone to do it for you.

It goes beyond the scope of this article to discuss FTP’ing, but in a nutshell it’s the programmes used to get web pages from your computer onto the internet. It requires a little bit of knowledge about web site addresses, and also a little bit of programming, although not very much at all. There are very good guides on the internet as to how to do this, and also with the software I am about to discuss quite a lot of the FTP is made very simple for you.

For basic web sites and to start off with anything like Microsoft FrontPage 2003 or Expressions or Adobe, Dreamweaver would be absolutely fine to create a web site. You could also use Adobe Photoshop if you have a very graphical based web site, and this is the preferred option of a lot of web site designers.

All of these programmes have FTP built in, so as long as you know the various technical details such as your FTP address, it will be fairly easy to set up. If you use a supplier like names.co.uk then they have telephone lines you can call to talk you through the process, and I have always found them very helpful when I’ve used them.

We’ve also had packages in the past with http://www.1and1.co.uk/ and http://www.uk2.net/, but both of these really require you to do the work yourself, and I’ve found their customer service departments to be extremely unhelpful.

At the same time, because you have a domain name and some web space you will also have email addresses that you can use for your web site, with the ending of your domain name. If you use names.co.uk they have a very simple web mail programme, and also have an easy to divert email system where you can enter your usual email address and have all the emails from the domain name sent to your email address.

The next thing you’ll need to start looking at is designing web pages.

Designing web pages

In days gone by, people had to design web pages from scratch, starting with a blank canvas and putting things onto the page. This is no longer the case. There are so many programmes out there that you can rely on and edit your web pages but there is no longer any need to worry about programming.

There are large numbers of template companies out there who will enable you to choose a web package, pay about £30-£40 and download a template onto your computer to use as your site.

These are usually very efficient, and a very quick way of setting up a 10-20 page site.

However, if you are planning to have a web site with lots of content, the usual recommendation is for what is called a CMS system which is content management and is basically a very large database that hosts all your web pages and makes them very connected together and saves a lot of work.

The best known of these is one called Joomla. Joomla is very simple to use, once it is installed on your system, but again you will require some technical assistance to get this up and running. There are numerous tutorials online which explain all about the use of it, and make it fairly easy to do once it is in place.

When you start off with a web site it is a lot of trial and error as to see what works and to see that of your competitors.

The key to having a web site is to accept that you can have the worst looking web site or the best looking web site on the web, but if nobody can see it it is a complete waste of time. So once you have your web site it is then you have to look at marketing it.

The Chester web marketing company can do this for you, and save you a considerable amount of time. Not only can we set up your web site for you and lines, we can also make sure that people can see it. We have experience ourselves of promoting our own web sites, not linked to marketing, and we can safely say that it’s really time and effort that gets any web site into the top part of the listings and without this, web sites simply fail or cost a lot of money to do anything with.

If you would like further information please visit http://www.chesterwebmarketing.co.uk/ or email enquiries@chesterwebmarketing.com