When you do something day-in and day-out you eventually take lot of things you do for granted. The trick that all professionals deal with is how to convey these things to a someone who doesn’t. So, if you’re someone who is having a website built hopefully this info will have some educational value.

Buying a Domain Name

Ever wonder how people get their own .com, .net, .org, etc? It’s not hard and anybody can do it. As a client you’ll probably want to own your domain. I recommend GoDaddy because they’re reasonably priced, reliable, and provide you free services like DNS and Forwarding that places like Dotster and Network Solutions charge for. Buy your domain for 2-3 years minimum making sure it’s set to “auto-renew”. Search engines actually take expiration date of a domain into consideration when determining the credibility of your site. The longer the better. Make sure to get a domain that’s easily pronounceable over the phone and preferably has the name of your business or keywords in it. You can always buy as many domains as you want and just forward them to your main site. Just pick a good domain because you’re probably going to be using it for your emails as well.

A home for your Site

That’s where a host comes in. Every website out there uses some form of hosting. Basically, it’s a server connected to the internet. Some companies have their own IT departments that handle the management and hardware but for the most part you should rely on the professionals to manage it.

Hosting can get VERY complex very quickly depending on your site’s needs. You can get away with $5/month hosting for so long but know that for a serious site that people will rely on you’re potentially looking at $100 to $1000+ a month. Hosting is not trivial and you truly get what you pay for. You’ve gotta think, someone needs to be there in case of hardware failure, denial of service attacks, traffic spikes, runaway processes, backups & restores, uptime monitoring, scaling, etc… As you can see there is a lot of liability and responsibility that shouldn’t be neglected.

Some sites use a lot of bandwidth for video, audio, images, downloads, and things of that nature. Some sites require a TON of storage if say for example you’re storing tons of video, audio, images, or downloads. Some require dedicated database servers for storing sensitive information (which I don’t recommend). There are a number of potential configurations you could end up with. All of which directly affect cost with most providers so planning ahead of time is a must.

Getting your own Email

Once you’ve purchased your domain name its pretty straightforward. Much like hosting a website hosting email has it’s own set of unique issues. The largest of course is SPAM. Many website hosting providers will also include email. This is fine except if you ever move hosting providers you’ll have to move your mail to. You don’t have to host your email and website on the same server and I recommend against it anyway. We use Google apps for our email because it makes use of Google’s insane GMail infrastructure. It’s very robust, clean, reliable, free, and has IMAP. Use IMAP to connect to your email. All the cool kids are doing it now and you won’t regret it.

Regarding Flash®

Flash isn’t bad if done properly and in the correct instance. Heck, that’s all we used to do and there are a ton of cool things you can do with it. We did however learn a lot from doing those too. A few words of wisdom: Don’t do an entirely Flash website unless you are presenting a multimedia heavy and concise message requiring a custom interface and experience. Also know you’re content WILL NOT be indexed by search engines. At best you’ll get a little alternate text indexed but that only goes so far. Flash elements in a site are fine, just make sure you consider alternate versions of the content for people without Flash. AKA: All iPhone users. Also, don’t auto-play music unless you are a music or video site. People do not like having other people stare at them and their workstation while they frantically yank at anything that looks like a speaker cable. Also, it goes without saying but don’t even consider a Flash intro for your site. As soon as the thought crosses your mind smack yourself. :)

To be continued…

That’s it for now. I’ll post some more bits when I get some time.