Simplify the Web

Many people ask a lot questions when they first start a website. Things like what it should look like, who should they go to for it to be designed, how do they get things up and running? All very good questions, the basics for getting a website setup on the Internet contain:

• Buy The Domain Name
• Get A Site Designed
• Determine Who's Going To Host The Site
• Push Your New Site Up To The Hosting Server

I'm going to focus on the third item.

Hosting is tough to choose from these days. There are TONS of people out there that are willing to give you a piece of their server to put your site up on and have you pay for it. There are many services out there that are free, or cheap. Yet, what people don't realize is that if you don't know what to look for, you could be caught off guard and wind up paying dearly in the end.

Doing a simple search on the Internet for hosting companies will bring up quite a few results. (10,800,000 as of this post)

What's the best one? What should you be looking for? The answer lies in you.

What's your budget? How much are you willing to spend on hosting per month and how much do you plan on doing to maintain the site? Hosts are more than willing to drop the pricing for you, IF you are willing to do some of the leg work yourself. If you want to make sure you back up your site regularly, then you can save some dough on some hosts. If you plan on making sure that you don't need any kind of extras like email accounts or lots of bandwidth, they will cheapen the price.

The problem is that many people don't know for sure what they need and thus they jump into a cheap hosting account and don't realize that as they need to grow their site to be able to account for their business, the host takes them to the cleaners. If you don't know what you're looking for or need, I would suggest you speak with your designer or someone in IT that would have a general idea of what you are trying to do.

Having an overall idea or attack plan to your site will help better maintain your expectations when setting up a site. Make sure you have an idea of what you are offering on your site, things like movies are large in bandwidth usage, so a site package at 500mb a month probably won't work for you. Make sure you have all you need in the setup, like email ability on the server to allow you to send email from the site if you have any automated forms.

Getting a good overall knowledge of your site and its functions will make finding a host that much easier in the long run and help you to control the cost as well. Look for a host that offers you a good blend of what you need, both services and assistance. Too much of either one and you will probably pay out the nose to get the other.

From CES 2008, here's a look at Bill Gates' last day as head of Microsoft.

I was asked recently what to look for in a website developer. I wasn't sure how to respond, since for seemingly obvious reasons I've never actually looked for a website developer.

In case you're looking for someone to help you with your website, here are my thoughts as a web professional: don't settle. Make sure that the geek you choose knows their stuff...if they don't, you should choose someone else.

Essentially - despite being a designer - I consider design secondary to code. Why? Simple: if you have a great design but bad code, your site probably won't work well...but if you have a so-so design with great code, your site can exceed your expectations. A well-written website is very easy to redesign, so the code seems more important to me. Here are a few things to consider:


1. What's your goal?
If you don't know EXACTLY what your website is supposed to accomplish, you'll never know how to build it, whether it's a dismal failure or amazing success, or when to make future changes. If you don't have a goal, you should stop all other activities and figure out what to do.


2. Who's your audience?
Web development is all about presentation. If your audience is your own organization, you'll do things differently than you would from a 'marketing' perspective. For example: a captive audience doesn't need to find your website...they know exactly where it is. Search engine considerations go right out the window in such cases. If, on the other hand, being found by strangers is important to you, it's crucial to choose a developer who knows their stuff. Knowing who your website is for is more than a secondary consideration.


3. Plan for the future
Here's my not-too-subtle personal opinion: if they don't hand-write valid and semantic (X)HTML + CSS, they're not going to help you in the ways you probably need help. Here's what that sort of code does for you:

...a. Makes updating and maintaining your website easier (and usually less expensive)

...b. Makes redesigning your website in the future (in 2-3 years, probably) much less time-consuming and difficult (and usually less expensive).

...c. Makes the search engines love you. They don't prefer good code to bad, necessarily...but bad code almost always makes your web pages fatter, which is an important consideration for search engines. The better your code, the (usually) better your ranking. As one example, I showed someone earlier today how to trim their existing web page from 34000 characters to 12000 without changing how the page looks or acts. Most search engines consider your code-to-content ratio an important consideration, so that change would probably jump their ranking significantly.

...d. Makes your site work better for everyone. You don't know how people will access your web page...so valid and semantic (X)HTML + CSS is the best way to go. Older and deprecated code won't render as well for folks using phones, screen readers, etc...put your best foot forward and you'll be surprised at how successful your site can be as a result.

There are three parts to a successful website: good code, a nice design, and quality content. Make sure that whomever you choose will address all three.


- Tony

FINALLY!

It has taken us a bit to get things to where we like, but finally we have combined the technology and methods found in our design agnostic blog and incorporated them into a Content Management System as well!

Now we can take any site that exists and set it up to allow someone to be able to edit the content of their site without tinkering with the rest of the code! A one time setup fee and hosting your site with us will allow you to easily log into the backend and edit your content without having to hire an IT geek to do it for you.

We heard tons of feedback about wanting a simple solution to be able to edit your content without being a rocket surgeon...and without giving up the design that people are used to...so, after 18 months of trial and error, it's finally here! PageProLive