Setting Up Your Stall

Home, Home on the Web

Now you need a home on the internet for your on-line business. Basically, there are two ways to go - free and paid.

There are a number of sites that will allow you to set up a web site for free - they'll give you space on their servers, and tools to help you make the pages. The trade off is that they pay their bills by selling advertising space - which means that your pages carry ads for other companies.

This advertising can be very obtrusive, and you must be aware that it can be an irritation for your visitors - not a great frame of mind for them to be in if you want them to spend money with you!

The other consideration is that free sites can't afford to give you the kind of support and technical facilities that you can buy. This will be more important if/when your business becomes more critical and sophisticated.

Free Sites

It's quite understandable that you will want to start off with free pages, and it's a great way to set up your site and make sure it works the way you want before you spend any money with a hosting service. If you use the kind of structure I'll show you later in the demo site, it will be easy to move your site around.

A good place to start looking for a free web home is BizLand. You'll get 35Mb of space, and complete freedom over the layout.
It can also become part of your revenue generation (of which more later ...)

The demonstration site (free version) is currently hosted on free space at MySite Inc. Here, you only get 2Mb space - but that's enough for many sites, and they have the incentive of a $20 commission if anyone buys their paid hosting from your site =:>

Of course, the price you pay for a free site is that they put their ads on your site - with BizLand you can at least choose between banners and pop-ups - the latter being worthy of consideration if you are running your own page-top banners. Otherwise, the top half of your visitors screen will have nothing but ads on it - not very welcoming.

A number of free sites - like BigStep don't give you full control over page layout, but make you work within their templates. Although you won't be able to follow the Practical DotCom Business site layout model very closely with that kind of site, it can be useful to familiarise you with page design and layout.

Also - there is no harm in having your site (or at least a single page pointing to your "main" site) on any number of free sites. You will need to keep it up to date in more than one place, but it increases your exposure and gets you listed in the different free host directories and so on.

All I would suggest is that you get your site up and running - and stable - on one site, before you start replicating it.

Warning

It is very possible for these free sites to go bust without any responsibility to you or your site. At the very least, make sure you have a copy of all your pages on your computer (especially if you have used their page building tools). It does underline the value of having your own domain name (see below), as you can quickly move your domain pointer to another free host if the worst happens.

Paid Hosting - No Monthly Fees

If not immediately, you will certainly at some point want to consider "proper" paid web hosting for your site. Apart from the increased reliability and robustness, a paid hosting service will give you the facilities to add more sophisticated technology to improve your business over time. It's also a much more professional and credible image to project to prospective visitors and customers.

You may have looked at prices for web hosting in magazines and so on and thought you can't afford them, but there are now companies like No Monthly Fees where you can get an excellent, fully functional commercial site set up for a one-off initial payment, and a tiny annual fee.

They are very open on their site about how they can do this - they carry advertising and promotions on their site that are targeted at you - a webmaster. But - they don't interfere with what you show and tell on your own site, so you don't have any of their banners or pop-up ads getting in the way.

Paid Hosting - Best of Breed

If you really want to "go for it" and/or value the increased professionalism, performance and reliability of the best possible commercial service, there are many different web-hosting companies fighting for your business.

Unfortunately, it is not difficult to set up as a web hosting company, reselling the facilities of one company that is reselling the facilities of another ... and you can't usually tell from the advertising and on-site promotion what is really happening behind the scenes.

For a first site especially (although its also a favorite with thousands of experienced webmasters), I suggest you look at Virtualis. They are right at the top of the supply chain and there are two key reasons for considering them seriously:

• Their HiRize management system allows you to easily manage all the complexities of your site through a simple point and click interface.
• They have what is probably the best support in the business, based on more than 5 years hosting experience, with real humans available to help you if you have problems!

... and although that sounds like a Rolls Royce service (it is!), they manage to do it at extremely attractive prices, offer great value for money, and have a range of packages and facilities that can grow with your business.

Again, they are a very open company, and will show you "behind the scenes" tours of their operations and support centres, and they do come with a body of recommendation from the webmaster community that - frankly - I don't think you will find anywhere else.

Domain Names

Even if you start with a free web site - if you have any money at all to invest in your site at this stage, I would strongly recommend registering your own domain name. This has 2 main benefits:

• A more memorable name makes it easier for customers to get to - and come back to - your site.
• If you outgrow your web hosting company, or want to move for other facilities, you can move your site and keep your name.

The web hosting companies referred to above can all help set up domain names to work with their services.

If you already have - or set up - free pages elsewhere, companies like Virtualis can help you with domain registration and point it at your free pages.

I also like the freeparking.co.uk / com setup because they have a site that is friendly to both sides of the Atlantic and they give the level of DNS control that lets you provide free email services on your site (of which more later ...). You can check and register domain names with them here:

Note - you can register a domain name before you have a web site organised. Indeed, if you have a great name idea then you should register it as soon as possible. Thousands of domain names are being gobbled up every day - yours may not be there next week!

Newbie Tip (All formats)

The ideal - and most professional - setup, is to have a full "virtual server" account, where every page has your domain name on it as if you owned and run the machine it sits on. (The Virtualis type host.)

However, most people start out by registering a domain name and having it point to some free web space somewhere. (The bizland type host.)

When you're setting this up with your domain registration company, you will often get the choice (terminology varies) of using "URL masking", "framed forwarding" or similar. The upside to this is that your domain name always show up in the browsers Address bar.
The downsides are:

• The address bar doesn't change as visitors go from page to page, so they can never bookmark an individual page address (and it looks a little weird).
• More importantly, if you submit your site to the Search Engines, they won't see your page content - just the domain name container that's wrapped around it. You can usually tell if this is happening by choosing View - Source from your browser menu. If you can't see your content, the Search Engine won't either.