Starting a Business Website..

[angelajason06]

I am Confused about the Process of Making a Business website?? Can any One please tell me the answer of my following Questions??

1)Do Domain Purchasing and Purchase an Hosting are same thing???
2)How Do i get the Domain?? I mean which domain company is good??
3)Suppose i got my domain..When i open it what it will show?? a Blank page or any thing else??
4)Do i need to contact developer to make My website OR i can make it my self with wordpress??
5)If Developer can make it how much fees developer charge for making a Simple 6-7 page website like this website www. explodeseo. com?? (without content and with content).
6)What are the advantages of Making wordpress website??

Please answer who is experienced and Faced all these Steps..

Thanks

[Wozcreative]

As I am a website designer I can explain and answer your questions:

1. A domain is the address to where you host your website. It is a separate purchase. Usually costs between $10 - $60 dollars depending on the ending ".com, .ca, .net, .org"—each of these have different cost.
Hosting is the server on the internet that holds your files. It's like a harddrive.

2. You can buy it with a hosting account. To know if your domain is taken you can use the following domain generator to know if it has been taken already: Domain Name Search | Register Your Domain Name Now (http://instantdomainsearch.com/)

3. It will show some advertisements from the domain company.

4. Based on the above questions, I would highly suggest contacting a developer to get you the right hosting. However, since I am one,m I would suggest going to hostgator.com because it will allow you to install wordpress on it and the package is only about $80 for hosting + additional cost for your chosen domain. You can buy both at the same time.

5. Prices will vary greatly. If you don't have money you can pick a template that is available and edit it yourself, but I will guarantee it will look just as bad as if you were to hire someone to do it for $500. However it will take you about 3x as long to figure out how to do it on your own without training or youtube videos. If you are serious about having a professional website you will need to spend more at least $2,000 for a 5 pager (if you are getting someone from canada) and look at it as an investment and not an expense.

6. Advantages of wordpress is that someone like yourself can be easily trained to update your own website on the fly. However, just because you know how to use a program does not mean you know design.. so it does not always look professional. For example.. you may know how to type in MS Word, but a designer may know how to make everything look really good in MS word as apposed to you. The downfall if having a low budget is that the site will still look like a template if you plug in your own content. Most people who aren't designers will just paste the content in without any real styling and call it a day. This often shows poor quality in the website. Typography is a very important piece of knowledge in all form of good design, with pieces that need to communicate ideas, or sell things a designer can help with that, but it comes at a price.

[billbenson]

A website doesn't have to look professional to work (although a professional website is ideal). I have a very armature website that I built on an ecommerce cms similar to WordPress with a ecommerce plugin that sells extremely well. After about 8 years I'm having it professionally rebuilt, but it still sells and is often mistaken for the manufacturer's website.

You have to remember that most websites out there suck and not everybody looks at it through the eye's of a web designer.

I actually recommend you go through the process of building your own website and marketing it. Figure out how to get it number 1 on Google. Wordpress is probably the best way to do that today. Get a dummies book on html. If you are really ambitious get a dummies book on php/mysql - the language WordPress is built on. It should only take you about a month to get through the two books.

At some point you will probably want to hire a professional web developer, but how can you select someone who meets your needs if you don't have some basic website building and marketing knowledge.

Also, IMO, website marketing is more important than appearance. Building your own website will also teach you the marketing side. I know Vangogh has posted some links on this in the past.

[GreaterVisibility]

How did you get all of those websites in your signature without knowing these things?

[Wozcreative]

Also, IMO, website marketing is more important than appearance.

I disagree, without a properly structured website with the right hierarchy of information, the marketing of the website will not necessarily transform what's on the website into sales, it will only bring people to the site. Then you have to convince the user of the product or service by showing them the right information at the right times on the website. Design is not about appearance (graphical elements and fancy boxes), it's about bringing the user to an end result.

As Billbenson said, you can try to do everything yourself with the website it is totally possible, but you will need to spend a bit of time. Enough of my clients have built websites on their own and have thus kick started their business online.

[angelajason06]

How did you get all of those websites in your signature without knowing these things?

This is My partner's website(as i explained before). But I did not any experience to purchased any website.

[billbenson]

I disagree, without a properly structured website with the right hierarchy of information, the marketing of the website will not necessarily transform what's on the website into sales, it will only bring people to the site. Then you have to convince the user of the product or service by showing them the right information at the right times on the website. Design is not about appearance (graphical elements and fancy boxes), it's about bringing the user to an end result.

I didn't say SEO, I said marketing. That includes both on site and off site marketing. Your landing page has to sell as well as the off site stuff to get people to your site. Without that, it doesn't matter how pretty your site is or what colors you use etc. (within reason).

Vangogh wrote a site for me that has been done for well over 1 year. I haven't gone live with it yet. All my current dynamic page names are indexed, I place 1 to 3 on G for my most important key words depending on the day, and I get more emails and phone calls than I can respond to. And the site is butt ugly. Kind of nervous to take the new site live since my old site keeps me so busy.

Additionally, a CMS will force you to create categories, sub categories, etc to help a non professional to build a logical site.

One thing I did and helped my site immensely is a good search function. Part of what really sucks on my current site that I built is the navigation. But I wrote product descriptions with keywords. Not for Google, but for the site search function. Its a very old Oscommerce site. I haven't updated the Oscommerce in years. I have about 1500 products on the site currently. As an example, in a product description I put for a size "XXL (2X). A search will find either. I find it very frustrating to go to a site that has a poor search function. I think that is more important than the natural navigation.

I'm not diminishing the importance of your "hierarchy of information" statement. Nor am I diminishing what a professional web designer / developer can do for you. But I will stand by my statement that marketing is more important than design. That is also true off line as well.

[GreaterVisibility]

This is My partner's website(as i explained before). But I did not any experience to purchased any website.

Ah, I see. I didn't go back through all of your previous posts to find out. Makes sense. You've had some good answers here, but would your partner be able to help you? Seems like it would be convenient. He could probably walk you through the steps in person.

[Wozcreative]

Your landing page has to sell as well as the off site stuff to get people to your site.

This is why Design & Marketing are married, one and the same. Marketing material needs to be cohesive and the brand has to be consistent.. to do that you need "design". Some people call it the same thing in a sense because they are after the same thing.



...it doesn't matter how pretty your site is or what colors you use etc. (within reason).

This is why people do not invest in design, because they think that it is making things "pretty" unfortunately.

I strongly believe that in today's age, where the same product becomes ubiquitous and you need to differentiate one spoon over another spoon, the way you can do it is through marketing + design. You need a clever idea (marketing), with a cohesive execution (design), to differentiate you from the competition.

In any case perhaps we agree on the same things but we are going about it explaining it two different ways..

[billbenson]

In any case perhaps we agree on the same things but we are going about it explaining it two different ways..

I think that is the case here.