Website Design
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Introductory Guide to creating your own website

The main steps to obtaining a successful website are:

• Obtain a good Domain Name
• Choose a Web Hosting company
• Design the website for your business
• Maximise the potential of your website with SEO

Obtain a good Domain Name

A Domain Name is the address customers type in to find a website, so my Domain Name is peachily.com. Ideally, it should reflect the nature of your business, while remaining short and simple. Many favourable names have already been taken, but with perseverance and trying different combinations of words, you should be able to obtain a good Domain Name for your business.

Choose a reliable Registrar such as Register.com and type the name you want in the Search Box. It will let you know if it is available or not. The cost here is £35 but it may be worth waiting until you have chosen your Web Hosting Provider as some companies let you choose your Name for free as part of the package.

Choose a Web Hosting Company

There are many Web Host providers around, but it is important to choose a professional one with a good reputation. The Hosting company stores the website you create on their computers, and makes it available to the Internet. There are free hosting providers around but I believe anything that sounds too good to be true, generally is.

You want a provider that will make your website available all day, every day of the year, because if their computers go down, then your website is no longer accessible to your customers. Choose one that offers 24/7 support and test the support with phone calls, Emails, etc, out of hours to test their response time.

The web hosting provider I use is Host Excellence. They offer a Hosting Plan from $7/month, and allows you access to their Website Builder software to design your website yourself if you so wish.

Design the Website for your business

As mentioned above, your Web Hosting provider may well offer its own software that will allow you to design your website. There are also many software products available that you can use, the most popular being Macromedia Dreamweaver. The disadvantage of these being many are not free, and they also take some time to learn how to use them effectively. If you are using your own software to build your website, then it also requires File Transfer Protocol (FTP) software to allow you to transfer your website to your Web Host provider. This will then make your website available to the Internet.

While you are designing your website, it is worth considering whether you would like dynamic design functionality to allow your visitors to interact with your website. Please visit our dynamic website design page for an explanation on dynamic programming and databases, and how they can benefit your business.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Maximising the potential of your website is the process of tuning the way it is indexed by Search Engines, with a view to gaining a better ranking. The result of this will be to make your business better available to the customers who are looking for the product or Service that you provide. Please visit our optimisation page for an explanation of the services we offer