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Creating a Website 101

We get a few queries every now and again asking about what’s involved in setting up a new website, so I thought I’d answer some of the most common questions you’ve asked!

 

1) So I’ve decided I want a website, what’s the first thing I need to do?

Research! This first thing is to ask friends and look for recommendations on groups – also check out other websites you like the look of depending on what you want to achieve depends on the price and how much content you will need to create yourself.

The other thing to think about is if you would like to build it yourself on a website builder platform or if you would like to pay a designer. Keep in mind when you choose to do-it-yourself and use a website builder, the reality of your design can often prove a little frustrating, and not match up to your initial vision.

Choosing to use a Web Designer will not only take away that frustration but showcase your professionalism as a business owner. As a small business owner, there are never enough hours in the day to achieve all the things on the to-do list. If you were to add to that the task of creating, maintaining and updating your website as your business grows (should you choose to build it yourself), could be the one thing that takes you away from doing what you specialise in and love doing the most.

Therefore, handing this task over to a professional, who can design and build a website and continue to look after it thereafter, could save you countless hours of work and time when you could be generating income.

 

2) What is a domain name and where can I get one from?

Put simply this is the name of the website that you would like.

It can end in .co.uk .com .uk or .org (there are many others but we won’t list them all here). Domains vary in cost from 0.88p for the first year up to thousands each year!

There are such things as premium domain names that have already been registered, but are available for sale at a premium price. A domain name is just the name of the website – you can own 300 domains and point them to one main site or you can own just one – there is an old school SEO tip that says if you have purchase the search terms in domain names you will rank higher, we will leave that tip for you to decide on whether it is worthwhile or not bearing in mind each domain name costs money!

 

3) What is a website host and how is this different to a domain name?

Website Hosting is what is required to make your website public to the world. Every website that would like to be viewed requires hosting.

Think of it in this way, you need footings to build a house – you need hosting to build your website and make it viewable to the public. Black Nova Designs is a web hosting service provider that provides the technologies and services needed for the website to be viewed on the Internet.

We offer various types of web hosting services available to host your website. Before signing up for web hosting services, it is important to understand what kind of service you or your business needs, allowing you to make a cost effective decision on the correct package. Remember you can always upgrade at a later date if you out-grow your web hosting package.

 

4) What are the costs of having a website created?

Costs of a website vary – depending on how much you wish to do on your own, with a designer, what platform you are using and if you want to use basic templates, premium templates or custom coded designs. Giving a cost is like guessing how long a piece of string is but we will try to demystify this a little!

The cost depends entirely upon request but lets generalize a few things – if you are looking at a blog website – this is just a home page, blog pages with categories and a contact page this is very simple so you’d have to pay for hosting, domain, (wih us that would be approx £34 a year) and competitive design fee with your chosen designer.

If you require an information site – something like a veterinary clinic – then hosting and domain is around £70 a year and then your design fee on top of this. The only ongoing costs are hosting and domain names!

If you require a shopping or ecommerce website the prices change dramatically depending on products, variables, payment gateways, product categories, brands etc. Starting price is usually £650 all the way up to thousands. An example of a shopping site is  https://www.horseshoehearts.co.uk/. 

 

5) Is it easy to link an email to a website?

So you link the domain name to the email address so long as you own the domain. If we host the site depending on the hosting package relates to how many mailboxes you can open, although usually this is unlimited. If we do not host your website, we can still host your emails so long as you have domain log in details you can point the mx records to our servers to bring the emails to us – we have some clients with website builder platform websites and pay us for the email addresses.

If we host the website the emails can be added on easily through cpanel or by contacting us – we provide support, set up instructions and remote support set up where required.