The Internet
revolution has created new opportunities to gain a competitive business
advantage with
its accessibility 24 hours a day for advertising, customer service, and online
ordering. Further, the incremental cost of
your Internet presence is so low that it's more cost effective than any
other contact you can have with your customers, vendors, and even employees.
Creating
your Internet presence is easier than you might think - particularly as NexLAN
specializes in "Business-Only" website hosting and development
services.
#1 The first step to
establishing your presence on the Internet is to choose the
"address" you'd like to use. While it's certainly possible to
use a "sub-domain", such as http://www.nexlan.com/yourbusiness,
this makes it difficult to change hosting services and it doesn't have the cachet
or professionalism of http://www.yourbusiness.com. Also with your own
domain name, it's simple to have e-mail addresses such as you@yourbusiness.com.
So for portability, professionalism and e-mail support we recommend procuring
your own domain name.
Registering your domain
name is simple and inexpensive. We prefer the original, and in
our opinion still the best, registrar: Network Solutions at
http://www.networksolutions.com.
The cost is only $35/year and we are happy to handle the
registration process - we don't even "markup" this fee!.
#2The
next step is creating your website.The
site can be as
simple as a billboard with basic contact information, or as complex as an active data
site with secure socket layer online credit card processing and streaming on
line audio and video. Because of this broad spectrum, website development
is generally billed on a "per hour basis" and it's important to see
samples of the developer's work along with the time/cost involved in each
sample. Also be
sure the developer can handle not only your immediate functional requirements,
but any future requirements, such as credit card processing. For examples of
our work, please check out NexLAN's
Web Design Services. Often, after the initial setup and design,
it's cost effective for you to perform the routine maintenance of your
website. In these cases it's important the tools used to build it are
user-friendly enough for a non-expert. Be sure and ask what tools are
being used in the development of your website!
#3 Finally, unless you
have your own high bandwidth connection and staff skilled in setting up web servers,
you'll need to outsource hosting for
your website.The importance of
this step can't be overstated!Changing
hosts usually involves downtime for your website and your e-mail while the site
moves, so choose a full-service, dependable hosting company and you won't have to move the
site later and suffer downtime. Your checklist for hosting providers should
include at least the following:
High-bandwidth upstream Internet
connections - preferably redundant so failure of one connection doesn't take
your site down!
Support of any server-side extensions
development and maintenance may require - such as Microsoft FrontPage
In-house DNS Servers - so changes to
the server your site "lives on" can be done quickly and easily
Streaming audio and video capability
Backend database support
E-mail support for your domain
While you might not need all the above
functionality when initially bringing up your website, it's better to choose a
hosting service provider that can handle your growth and not have to move the site later!