Some days I cannot go outside without running into people who need a website for their business but admit they havent a clue about how to get started. I come across people all the time who are looking for help, with no idea of what they have to do, their costs, or responsibilities might be. Requests for help are coming my way more and more, which only proves how the Web has become an essential part of our lives, and as such an essential tool for information and communication. There are indeed a number of things that an owner of a site should have in place before they proceed in this competitive and evolving scene.

Requests for help are coming my way more and more, which only proves how the Web has become an essential part of our lives, and as such an essential tool for information and communication.

Read the following, but first develop a plan, and consider how you will integrate a website with your current business. You will need to create a strategy, and find ways to promote your site regularly with the intention of bringing more attention you.

• Get a Web domain. This requires a little bit of research to find one that is available, of course, and you will need to start on the web to do that. Don’t just go anywhere, because some sites share your domain with parties who will then scoop up the domains you were looking for. Go to Network Solutions,  who have a good reputation in this regard. And you generally need a domain before getting web hosting, the next step. Get your credit card out for this part. Initial domain purchases are commonly for 2 years. Having 5+ years of subscription to a domain is good for search engine results. And yes, a site can support more than one domain. Domain forwarding, also called DNS forwarding, may be bundled, included, or a separate cost. Depends on who you go with. You can host with me if you really want to. Domains cost about $20 per year, depending on the suffix and service you choose. You can use the domain lookup on my site by going to http://www.superwebdeveloper.com/domain-lookup/.
• Get Web site hosting. If you are just starting out, and really dont know who to go with, Dreamhost is a good choice. But there are good affordable choices in most major cities. The Dreamhost.com site page describes a good list of what should be in a hosting package. Here is the Coles notes version: It should have FTP and shell access, It should have Cpanel or something like it, It should run the latest software stack, and run on Linux, because Windows for this work is garbage. You should have a generous amount of bandwidth, disk space, databases, emails, and when you have an issue, you should easily be able to get someone via the phone or email. Don’t find the cheapest little company to do this on; there are lots of affordable options for you, for well under $200 per year. Connecting the domain to the website is a small procedure that may take a day to come into effect.
• Get the Web site created. While I have coded up custom sites, unless you have a very particular business venture, you can make use of one of the many packages that are a real ‘website in a box’ that can be set up quickly for your needs. For most people ask me for help, the first best choice is usually Wordpress. With over a thousand layouts (‘themes’) to choose from, you can find something that looks like what you want. There are lots of built in ‘bells and whistles’ these days, like slide shows, RSS feeds, image galleries, and they are all within reach. Software for WordPress falls into one of three categories: the core, themes, and plugins.
• How not to get a site: Making a site from scratch can be a good basic exercise, and you can learn a lot from doing this. However, you will quickly find you need an efficient way to add updates, change content, make use of other resources like social networking, different kinds of media, different languages perhaps. A scratch built site will soon be a ball of spaghetti that is difficult to maintain if there is not a well organized ’separation of concerns’. You are also reinventing the wheel. There are things to avoid at all cost, like designers whose only skill attribute is using Photoshop, and use it as a web development tool. Those kinds of people create stupid garbage that people like me get saddled with the miserable chore of cleaning up long after they are gone. Also if you need a developer to do your content updates, something is terribly wrong.
• Selling something? If you are selling like one thing, get a PayPal account. Selling a bunch of stuff, you will need to run your site on a package like Zen Cart, OsCommerce, or something similar. If you do you will need a dedicated IP address in your hosting (cheap), and a secure certificate, so you can have an ‘https’ web address. Cost for that is about $50 per year. You can also consider buying into an online marketplace like the one Yahoo or Etsy.com offers.

If you are faced with the prospect of paying for a software package to run a website, seek the advice of other software developers.

• Software packages again: WordPress for individualistic pursuits, Drupal for community systems, and for multiple product online stores, Zen Cart or OsCommerce or perhaps a cart plugin or module made for Drupal or WordPress. Some web hosts will even install these pacakges for you.
• Free stuff. The best things in life are free and so are the best things on the web. While that most often means free as in beer, it is especially free as in speech. Commonly, websites run on a stack of software, and we are usually talking about the LAMP stack, for ‘Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, although the P can refer to Python or Perl also. No matter. If you are faced with the prospect of paying for a software package to run a website, seek the advice of other software developers. If you dont know anybody, go email people who advertise on Craigslist. In most cases, there is software that is free to get, free to use, free to modify, and free to share with whoever you please at no cost. Why is the majority of the Web running on free software? Complex software was able to be developed through a community that supports openness and discussion. For this to happen, it had to be free in the ways just described.
• Make extensive use of third party web applications and sites. Accounts with Delicious, Flickr, and YouTube can be had and integrated with your website with a Yahoo! and Gmail email account. There is also Twitter, FeedBurner, Vimeo and FaceBook. All this is free.
• As part of your web strategy, add content regularly, whatever you do. Don’t put up a page that doesn’t have regular updates posted on it. A site that is static will be quickly forgotten about.
• You may need a developer at some point in the process. Developers show off the free stuff they do so they can sell custom services. Developers should be able to give you lots of free advice up front before deciding what it is they will do for you for money. Developers should know something about programming languages like PHP and JavaScript, and possibly other languages such as Ruby On Rails, Python, Perl, Java. They should all know something about SQL, likely MySQL, and using the Linux/Unix shell. Design skills are known as ‘Front end’ skills, and while a developer will have a grab bag of design skills, don’t expect them to be master of everything. The better they are, the greater the division of labor and skills. But they should know something about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, graphics for the web, useability, standards, social networking, and other tools that you can learn to use.

The best things in life are free and so are the best things on the web.

• A good developer should be able to educate you on how to do things. A good developer does not want to be tasked with doing your content updates. As a developer, my credo is not to work for a living, but to eliminate work. As automation is a very valuable service, there is always new work, and another thing to automate. Developers also provide problem solving with third party solutions like payment processing gateway accounts, clouds, custom coding and modifications, system backups, data imports and exports, performance reports, and provide formatting media formats for your website.
• SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. You don’t have to worry about it right out of the gate, but using a pre built package for a site as described above will put you on the right path. Doing things right with the basics will get you the best results down the road when you put an effort into that.
• Websites should not have too wide a semantic range. If you want to make a site about fashion, but are interested mostly in shoes or handbags, make a site that is about shoes, or handbags. If you are straining to include other topics under the same rubric, consider making another website for that idea.
• If you can create and send a web based email with Yahoo!, Gmail, or if you can use Facebook, if you can do other things like resize and crop an image with a simple image editor, you have all the skills you need to own and operate your own web site. Really you do, even if you think there is something more to learn because from a technical point of view there is not, because everything afterwards is a web form, a checkbox, a text field, a setting.
• Make Firefox your default browser. Kick the IE habit.

If you can create and send a web based email with Yahoo!, Gmail, or if you can use Facebook… you have all the skills you need to own and operate your own web site.