• DO I NEED AN INTERNET SITE?

Yes you do. To have a business without a site means you don't really care so much about your customers. It's actually disrespectful not to have one. Word of mouth in the 21st century is mainly electronic. People will expect you to have a website - at least for contact information. If you do not have a website people will wonder "Why not?". Then if anything goes wrong, that "I don't have a website" thing suddenly adds fuel to the fire. Thus, not only is a website a great contact point, it's also good P.R.

• DO WE DO HOSTING?

Yes but only for 3 year contracts and in concert with other services.

• DO WE DO WEB DESIGN?

No. But we do have contacts with a spectrum of designers.

FREE WEBSITE TEMPLATE

• DO WE OFFER OTHER SERVICES?

Yes. programming, security coding, site and dns management.

• DO I NEED PROFESSIONAL HELP? [2011040301]

MAYBE!It's easy enough to put up a simple website on your own and in your own language. But... if you are marketing to more than 1 country, you may need some translation. There is some difference within English languages also.
But BE WARNED... if you are going to use a database and allow user input & storage in more than 1 language you would be wise to give this 'written-by-a-google-guy' publication a lookover and decide for yourself what your limitations are... CHARACTERSETS & COLLATION

1. YOUR PURPOSE

Will this be for personal, small business, or enterprise. Of course there is a range of possibilities within each of these classes but the distinctions are well know. For instance - in the enterprise class, you would have many persons accessing the site as well as probably a firewalled database, billing services, supplier vendor management and real user networking. Small business would generally have growth, marketing and access concerns, netcasting, download services, upload services...

2. SCOPE

Database needs, transaction point, customer reference & help, sales initiator, language and translation, viewer participation, content provisioning, adwords, affiliations, user input handling, hit logs, device readiness, trademarks and logos....

3. YOUR BUDGET

Hosting itself is relatively inexpensive. You can get started for next to nothing. The nicest thing about the internet is that it is so scalable. BUT STAY AWAY FROM PROPRIETARY THINGS! ALWAYS GO WITH OPEN SOURCE. Open Source software is out there, its very good, the best and brightest all over the world work with it. AND IT DOESNT CRASH. With LINUX systems, you can upgrade WITHOUT REBOOTING! and you can use any system to connect to a LINUX server - ANY system. Remember to support your open source server-ware source when you can- its also good karma.

4. SCALE/CHANGES

By identifying the TYPES of changes you will make, you will be able to more easily determine what type of hosting platform will work best for you. Have this information ready.

• frequent changes - means pictures and content on an hourly - monthly basis not to be confused with simply adding on
• addons/accumulation - means that you will be adding content to your existing site as time goes
• business growth - means you will not change anything except as your business expands and the changes will reflect that product changes are considered separately and such changes are handled by a product template and have otherwise no effect on your basic site that represents your company

• SECURITY Will you have user input?
• PRIVACY POLICY How do you handle user input?
• REFUND/RETURN POLICY Transaction processors/banks require this now. they do not like dealing with chargebacks and complaints.
• SCALE If you are going to be adding to or predictably expanding your business size, this is usually not a problem given the flexible nature of internet services. but you should consider 1 thing.... throughput / bandwidth
• TRAFFIC If your site is large and/or popular, you will need to estimate the cost of delivery.

Bandwidth is the number of traffic lanes to your site. Think 16 lane freeway. The importance of this aspect is .. how many hits can you take during a short time. if everyone comes to your site during say, holidays, or vacation time, are you offering so much at once that many visitors will get a "timed out".

Throughput is the amount of data going out (going in is negligible unless people are uploading files to you). this is similar to the electric meter as in kwh. with regard to bandwidth and throughput, considerations are a hosting type choice;

• shared hosting you are on a server with others and share the same network card (nic) and line, shared ip
• dedicated hosting you are on a leased server, have your own nic, your own ip, server software generally included by the lessor.
• server collocation you are on your own server. this is generally what you want if security and/or server software is an issue. you must provide all your upgrades etc.

• TABLES For simple not complex, many columns or many rows but not so many nested tables. Generally anyone can pick up where you leave off. If you are going over 4 tables a page, perhaps you should have taken a different route.
• GRID Requires specific software, not expensive, easy to manage, doesnt scale well, the source file is required, software required
• CSS Larger apps that change or allow customer fits; any professional can pick up; scalable only if created to scale, professionals can easily do this. scaling up can also be accomplished with a combination of tables and css for less cost
• SPACER Good for advertising but other than that, very very confined, not scale well; source file is required, expensive
• FLASH The graphical nature of this makes it more expensive as does the software. Not all clients will accept. *Issues with privacy* Flash is good for presentations but recently privacy concerns are a really big issue and we can no longer recommend this.
• TEMPLATED This "instant" site type has big cost advantages and "up and going now" advantages. Some hosts with site wizards require a contract, some cost an extra price. But in either case, you need to check the host rates out real good in case you can't "take it with you" if you move.
FREE TEMPLATE HERE

Sooner than later you are going to need to know how your website is performing. There are many such services and feedback programs available and you will need to know which ones will work for you IF you are intending to develop your readership, exposure, customer base using the built in aspects of the internet - as opposed to a "hands on personal contact system". Whatever you decide to use, you can go to THIS SITE for some RESULTS information. And finally, one thing you should be warned about... MANY COOKIE TRACKING AND SO-CALLED HELP SITES AND POPULAR SITES DO MORE TO ASSIST YOUR COMPETITION THAN HELP YOU - IN FACT THEY "HURT YOU". ie.. if you think you are getting EXPOSURE FOR FREE, you had best be aware that the provider company may very well be selling your hit and source information to a larger company. AVOID EXPOSURE DATA ENABLEMENT ON THE FACE OF "CORPORATE" SITES! Just figure that wallstreeted companies would sooner feed on you than help you.