For a web site to be accessible to the billions of surfers out there, several things must happen. You need:

• a Domain Name
• hosting
• to transfer your site to the host
• to get noticed by the search engines

We can do all of this for you, or you can do all or some yourself. You can pay upfront or pay a monthly amount, we are very flexible!

Domain name

This is the address of your website, the bit that usually looks like "www" dot "yourSiteName" dot "yourPreferredExtension". "yourSiteName" should be your business name if possible, there are good and bad ways to deal with this, we are happy to advise. "yourPreferredExtension" is the type of site and the country code, eg .org.uk indicates an organisation located in the United Kingdom. Again, there are pros and cons to various extensions, we are happy to advise. Sometimes the domain name you want is not available, so you have to compromise. Its important to think about this carefully. Once you have chosen a Domain name, it needs to be "registered". There are hundreds of domain name registrars in the world. Prices and support vary widely. Your Domain name is valuable and needs to be registered with a trustworthy registrar. You may feel more confident dealing with a local registrar rather than one on the other side of the world. There's no such thing as a free lunch, so be careful of the low price registrars. Having said that, there are low price registrars that are completely reliable, talk to us.

Hosting

If you are a small company/organisation, you will probably start out on the web using "shared hosting". This is where the web server is shared amongst maybe 1000 clients. This may sound like too much for one web server, but it depends on hardware, software and loadings. Reliable hosting companies would never overload a server so that your site appeared unduly slow or unresponsive. Like Domain name registration, there is a wide variety of hosting pricing and quality. Hosting companies usually offer "reseller" plans which suit web developers who then claim they have their "own" hosting. Just be aware that hosting offered in a particular country may be "reselling" hosting domiciled in another country (typically the USA). You need to ask probing questions to avoid being taken advantage of. If you have too much traffic for shared hosting, you can use semi-dedicated (or virtual private server) hosting or have your own web server. This can be housed at a web hosting company (telehousing) and controlled remotely, or you can have your web server physically on your own premises connected to the internet. If you run your own server, you will need advice on security and how to have minimum outages, we all expect 100% uptime!

Transferring your site to the Internet

Usually, a new site is developed on a local computer and moved to the web server when it is time to "go live". This involves transferring files using ftp (file transfer protocol), setting up robots.txt and maybe .htaccess and if necessary loading database tables.

Get noticed by Search Engines

You can submit your site to search engines or have another site that is already being spidered link to your site. For google, we believe the best way is to submit a google sitemap. If you are not too comfortable with this sort of thing, we can do it for you, just ask.