THE TEN STEPS TO A DECENT WEB PRESENCE

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The very first thing a new web site owner need to do is to understand why they want a web site presence at all. The internet is a handy place to be but not must place some people would have you beleive. Knowing why is is the first step to knowing what and that leads to how, when and how much. Let’s take those in turn and expand on why it’s so critical to make this your first step.

WHY ? – it could just be tha you want to tell people about your pet cat. In that case your target audience will be those who love cats (ed. Rule me out of that one).  People who like cats and use the internet might search on cat topics. So what do learn from that ?

1. You should look for buying a domain name with the term “cat” or more likely “cats” or “kittens” perhaps. Your alternatives, especilly if your site is going to be fun or zanny is using some sort of cat activity – ScratchPost.com ? FleeRiddenRats.com ? (ed. sorry I really don’t like cats).

2.  The dot com also would depend on the visitors you want to attract. If you only want to focus on UK then a co.uk domain is best.

3. As your target audience if in the UK you don’t want to base your site the other end of the world so look for a UK host.

4. Your site will be mostly images and comment and so the simplest of web space is all you need but I would stay away from free web space. In general it now very hard to drive traffic to free web space simply because the structure of the systems they sit on and the fact that they tend to house a lot of spam or purely promotional rubbish. Almost always when a person signs up to a free web account the hit restrictions. Web space need not cost a lot so why go for the cheapest option. If you site is not worth £20.00 a year to setup properly then why bother. Look professional even if your site is just an hobby you need it to reflect your interest in it and the people who come to view it. 

5. A simple site could be better termed as a brouchur site and if you have ever used Ms Word or Ms Powerpoint you are already more then capable of producing this type of web site. No need then for external costs.

But what if you have grander ideas ?

You want to be able to cominicate with people and discuss cats on your web site. Perhaps your aim is to build a community of cat lovers and use that community to earn money.

6. Almost is all cases you’ll need a slightly more advanced hosting and this more or less rules out free hosting. But the more importent issue here is the application you use. That could be free using open source products but if needs to be able to do what you want doing. So right there you why leads on to a big how.

7.The are a number of really good produces available to build forums, almost all need a database to store the data. This need not extend your budget behond that stated £20.00 either so no extra cost. But you will have to try each one as they all have their issues and differing levels of difficulty to design, build and maintain.

But dealing with database driven sites does carry a rather steep learning carve if your eyes have already glazed over at this point. Many people do manage to acomplish what they want and you should not be dettered and we hope to cover these issue on this site.

What we’ve not covered here is perhaps 95% of all other options and type of web sites anyone might want to setup, not least ecommerce sites. The reason being that dealing with money needs more time and far more business expertise from the outset. We will cover  taking payments online, online stores and even auction but not today. A breaf outline of what we’ve covered here and what help it might be to the novice follows;

1. Make sure you know and understand what you want from your website.

2. Host and Build for your audience.

3. Find the right tools for the job and make sure you can work with those tools.

4. At all times have a professional aproach, you only get out what you are prepared to put in.