Help building a website: What is involved?

Clients range from either having an existing site they want to change or update, to clients who just want a hand getting their business online.  Frustrated clients do not understand whats is involved and often left at the whim of an uninterested host.  Perhaps a straight forward ‘guide’ of whats involved to set up a website might be useful.

Firstly some terminology.  The domain name is your website address or URL.  The hosting is the place on a server where your website files site, accessible to the Internet.  Email is a service that manages sending/receiving and storing emails and attachments.

The image below describes (in basic terms), the different options for ‘having a website’.

Separate Services.
It is possible to have each element of the website with different service providers.  You can purchase a domain name from one company, have the site hosted with another, and use a 3rd party service to manage your emails.  Perfectly viable of course and I have clients using this approach, but you have additional passwords to keep track of and differing billing cycles which could give the sense of ‘juggling’ different balls.  If something goes wrong you may need to spend longer figuring out where the problem lies.

One Stop Shop.
On the surface it is a very attractive option to put all your ‘eggs in one basket’.  Many home users receive a domain, hosting and email services with broadband accounts – which in terms of convenience and budget could be ideal.  However, I often am asked to support clients disillusioned with these companies.  ‘Off the shelf’ packages, especially from the larger companies on the Internet, means your domain and hosting are tied to one company; frequently experiencing poor service and where trying to get an answer for a question can be impossible.  The ‘support’ forums were setup in 2006 and havent been touched, no phone numbers and an email can take days for an answer.  Clearly these business do not care or resourced to ensure customers are happy leaving frustrated customers desperate for an ‘out’ and  a way to update their stagnant site.

“Recommended” approach.
Experience of both of the previous  setups leads me to recommend the third option.  Purchase your domain from an established registrar that includes basic DNS management.  This means that wherever you host the site, you can easily point a domain to the correct server.  Should the hosting prove unreliable then by requesting an edit to the DNS records you can change hosting and email management quite painlessly.

Yes, each of these approaches rely on a core service level agreement.  Even the ‘recommended’ approach may have problems but there lies the reward for researching background on a company on the Internet.

Costs for a domain are about £6-10 per year.  They vary by suffix (co.uk/com/eu etc.) and by registrar.  I would avoid going ‘cheap’ and choose an established company.

Hosting costs vary from £20 per year to thousands dependent on your required features.  For a decent small-medium entry level site I would suggest £40-£90 per year would provide a sold hosting/email/management service for your site.

If you would like further information on how to reorganise your website setup, or would like to talk about setting up a website, but contact me.