Designing a Website and Inexpensive Web Hosting

How to Build a Site with a Limited Knowledge of Web Design

Oct 9, 2009

Many small businesses would like to have a professional presence on the Internet but can't spend huge amounts of money. Where does one go to get inexpensive web hosting?

For small companies starting up, the budget is often limited. Creating a website on a small budget is not an insurmountable challenge.

Elements of Designing a Website

There are a number of elements that must be in place in order to have a website visible on the Internet.

Domain name: Choose a unique domain name that best represents the company or the individual. A domain name consists mainly of two parts, the name of the organization or individual and “dot” something indicating a country or type of organization, or both.

For example, “uniquename.com” would indicate a commercial website, whereas “uniquename.org” would indicate an organization. On the other hand “uniquename.co.za” would indicate a commercial company in South Africa, and so on.

The company's domain name will need to be registered. With a domain name comes e-mail addresses. It comes across as a lot more professional to have an e-mail address that uses the company's own domain name.

Designing a Website: A company will need to have something to post on the Internet. A website usually consists of one or more web pages that represent the company. These pages will often include something about the company and what they do and how to contact them.

Web Hosting: The company web pages need to be hosted on a web server in order for the web pages to be visible on the Internet. Although many large companies have their own dedicated web server, small companies should consider making use of a professional web hosting service to cut down the cost of buying a server.

Build Your Own Website

One easy way of putting together a website is registering with a professional, inexpensive web hosting service. For example, hostmonster.com offers domain registration and web hosting for $5.95 per month. Use their easy to navigate wizards to register the company's preferred domain name. With an account at hostmonster a company may host as many as a thousand websites, create up to five thousand e-mail addresses. Hostmonster will charge an extra $10 annual fee for each domain registered.

Next is designing a website that looks professional. Again, hostmonster can assist. If a company is looking for a dynamic website that can be updated without having to understand html coding, use the “wordpress” wizard to create a stylish, easy to maintain blog.

Although wordpress is designed to be a blog site, it is very versatile and can be used for other purposes. Once the “wordpress” website has been created it can be changed to suit the company identity. There a hundreds or free “skins” to choose from that require little of no effort to activate, each one as individual as the next, some funky, others corporate.

Adding posts and article to a “wordpress” website can easily be done through a management front end which allows companies to add and take away content at will.

With inexpensive web hosting and design solutions available, there is really no need to hire a costly web designer until the company is on its feet. Valuable startup capital can be best used elsewhere.

Computers may get viruses along with other computer related problems, so how the IT department handles these issues when the arise is vital in avoiding prolonged downtime for the company. A good help desk solution will help the IT department manage these problems efficiently.

General research is important in understanding all the risks associated with a computer environment. For example, an in depth understanding of how to enhance computer network security is a good place to start in understanding these risks.

The copyright of the article Designing a Website and Inexpensive Web Hosting in Website Design is owned by Fleur Hupston. Permission to republish Designing a Website and Inexpensive Web Hosting in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.