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No matter what business you're in these days, you need a website. Most people go directly to the Internet to find businesses, services, products, even contact information for people they already do business with. It's essential to have a web presence, but how do you make your website stand out? What do you need to know to get it done right?
This article answers common questions about creating and maintaining a business website. Some companies are fortunate enough to have in-house IT experts, others are left to wade through the jargon-laden information on the World Wide Web or in trade publications - which generally assume you already know what they're talking about. A good web developer will walk you through the process. Unfortunately, a lot of designers don't understand the "big picture" either. Our goal is to give readers enough knowledge to get what they need out of their websites.
The most important thing is to not be intimidated by what you don't know. A website is just a set of interconnected digital "pages" pertaining to a business, person, topic, etc. that exist at a single "address" on the World Wide Web. Once you have a site developed, you really only need two things to get it on the Internet: a domain name and hosting.
The domain name is simply the name of your site, which is generally the same as your Web address, such as www.yourwebsite.com. The Web address is also called a URL (Universal Resource Location), and it pinpoints the specific set of page files that for a particular site.
The site is hosted on a specific computer, called a server, which stores all the files for any given website. Some businesses have their own servers for data back-up as well as web hosting, but most pay a hosting company to take care of it. This is the most secure way to go and it generally provides more uptime, which refers to the amount of time your site is available on the Web. The opposite, of course, is downtime, which occurs when servers are updated, require maintenance, or suffer the occasional crash (don't worry, your data should be backed up and restored within a short time). Most good hosting companies boast 95% to 99.9% uptime and they generally deliver, though some claims are exaggerated. No one can guarantee 100% uptime.
