The novices guide to websites

A website is an essential sales and marketing tool for most businesses these days, opening up new markets and helping to retain customer loyalty. Businesses without one often find they lose customers to competitors who know the value of making information and purchasing opportunities available to anyone via their home PC.

For many small business owners, though, the internet may be unfamiliar and daunting. Instead, think of it as just another communications medium, with elements of print and broadcast.

It should be no more scary to use as an advertising medium than a local paper and can go much futher, becoming an active part of your sales and marketing.

Don't be put off by the jargon. In very simple terms, a website is just a collection of pages stored (or hosted) on a server – a computer that is permanently accessible via the World Wide Web. The companies that provide such servers are called internet service providers, or ISPs.

When your site is on one of these servers, it is given a unique address – called a uniform resource locator, or URL – which is registered with a central agency at the heart of the web. Rather like a telephone exchange this sends anyone typing in an URL to the server where it can be found. This URL is usually 'personalised", in the form of a unique domain name.

So is it hard to have a website? Not at all. You just need to have a website designed, as you would have any promotional material designed, then get an internet service provider to allocate that site some space on a server, and probably give that space a domain name.

Costs will depend on the complexity and size of a site. Like any other publicity, you will probably pay someone to design and produce it, then you pay for the space on a host computer. In fact, when you consider the cost of a newspaper ad that becomes tomorrow's chip wrapper, a site that's there and helping your business for a very long time can be very cheap indeed.

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• website design • hosting and getting a domain name • costs • more info