This is a educational page about Websites, Online Marketing, Web Terms, and more….

If you are new to the World Wide Web this is the perfect page for you.  You will learn what steps you need to take and how much you should spend to join the adventure of owning a website.  Check out our blogs for Tips & Techniques once you get all this down.

Step #1: You need a website.  Well, What kind of site?  What is the sites purpose?  How much is this site going to cost me?  How do I maintain it?  Where do I start?  Is this going to be a lot of work?

I am glad you asked…..All are very good questions.  Your site needs to be built to generate revenue and keep the attention of current clients.  A website is your best employee.  It works 24 hours a day and only says what you want it to.  It is also one of your least expensive employees.  The key is there are people out there searching for what you do and you are no where to be found.  These days that is equivalent to owning a retail store and not having employees to sell the products.  So what exactly is a website? Picture a website like a book, except it is online.  Just like a book it has pages.  A website is a collection of web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that is hosted on one or more web servers (we will get to that in a minute), usually accessible via the Internet.  Every website has an address (similar to your home) example: http://www.egonlinemarketing.com.  That is commonly addressed as a “URL” also.  Every website requires hosting in order for it to be veiwable on the world wide web.  So below is a list of things you need to do to have a functional website.

1. Buy a DOMAIN name.  My domain name is www.egonlinemarketing.com.  I buy my domains at godaddy.com.  They typically cost around $10 each.  If you want to save a few bucks do a google search for “cheap domain names” and find the Godaddy ad and buy them for around $7.  When you purchase your domain you can than offer an email like yourname@egonlinemarketing.com.  This is professional and shows you are not some fly by night company passing out some yahoo email address that you started for free.  This gives your business value.
2. OK, so we have a domain and now we need to find a HOSTING company.  Wikipedia – “A web hosting service is a type of Internet Hosting Service that allows individuals and organizations to provide their own Website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web hosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center, called collocation.”  We offer hosting but you are not required to host your site with us.  Be careful here because you can pay to much.  Hosting typically is offered by server space.  How many pages and media you have posted on your site.  I have heard hosting fee’s range from $9.99 to $250 monthly.  Hosting companies are responsible for keeping your site online.  It’s important that they offer you a VERY high percentage of online time guaranteed.  We offer 99.9% up time guaranteed or that month is free.  No server is 100%.  Hosting is important because after you build your website you will need it to show up online.  When choosing a hosting company you have to take a few things into consideration….Cost, reliability, how much space do you get, email, and performance.  Cost is important because hosting companies will charge a lot more than they should.  You should pay between $5 and $20 monthly depending on the size.  Hosting does not include site support for all web design/hosting companies.  Reliability is a big one because you want your site to be up and functional at all times.  Most hosting companies can offer a 99% up time.  It will occasionally go down for regular maintenance and that is to be expected.  You need to make sure you are not limited to how much space you are offered.  The reason this is important is because if you ever want to expand you don’t want to have to change servers.  We will sometimes put a limit on an agreement of some outrageous amount of space just in case someone wants to try to dump a ton of stuff on our server.  The reason we do that is because it will slow everything down.  However no site we will be building will reach the amount of space we limit.  All hosting agreements should offer email accounts that are domain specific like yournam@yourdomain.com this will make you look more professional.  Every account has different standards for email and how much it will cost.  We offer email free of charge up to 10 accounts per hosting agreement.  There are additional cost for email support, postini (spam fighter) etc…..  Performance is important for many reasons.  We used a godaddy server at one time and it was so slow the sites would take almost 30 seconds to load on a 16 meg internet connection.  Believe me that’s crazy!  So we use multiple servers now at a couple different places.  Performance can mean the difference between someone doing business with you or your competitor.
3. Choose your Web Design Company.  This is the tricky part.  So, I have done a blog on things you need to ask your web design company.  The blog explains things perfectly and totally exposes web design companies.  The one and most important thing you might want to make sure you get is a CMS to make changes to content and add pages at will.
4. Search Engine Submission.  Some companies won’t do this for you.  This is standard with us and we submit to google, yahoo, bing (new MSN search), and DMOZ.  We cannot guarantee ranking or if they will accept you.  However if we have built your site we are VERY confident in the fact that you will rank well for your keywords.
5. Get links to your website.  This is extremely important because google believes that if people will link to you then you are important and people like your content.  Google wants to deliver the most relevant search to the searcher and this is a big factor in their algorithm.
6. Update your site on a regular basis.

Now you are an expert and you know the process of add a website and getting started.  Just FYI the cost of websites should never reach $20,000.  We build websites that appraise for $20,000 for around $5,000.  Don’t pay for the extremly high overhead these big companies have accrued.  Be smart and go with your gut.