You've started your business and you know you need a website.
So how do you do it?
There are numerous options on how to set up a website,
the extent of control that you have,
and the effort that goes into making that website.
And we're going to go through the options
Before we get to the options.
Let's make it clear that there are three parts that make up a website.
There is the domain name, the hosting provider,
and the website itself.
An analogy I like to make is to think of it as a physical store.
The domain name is the name out the front.
It's the name of the business. It's the big sign that gets everyone's attention.
And if you move premises, you'll take your big sign with you.
The hosting provider is the address.
It's your address in the internet world.
Hopefully you have a big safe fence around it
and good strong foundations to your building.
And the website pages are the actual building.
You'll try and make it pretty and attractive to draw the customers in.
And you'll split it up into different rooms with some rooms,
maybe being the shopfront.
Some rooms may be having more information or services for your clients.
I always recommend that new companies buy their domain name,
whether it be your yourbusinessname.com
or yourbusinessname.com.au.
And just a side note on that to have a .com.au,
you need to have an ABN.
It is a yearly cost and it costs around $20 per year,
depending upon the provider.
And I've put some links down in the description to point you to some providers.
It should be one of the first things you check upon deciding upon your
company name, as to whether you can actually get your.com or .com.au
website.
You can check that on any of the domain name providers.
The reason that you grab your domain name is to make sure
that you get all of your traffic that you should be getting,
because if people are looking you up, they might go to that domain instead.
And it's also to make sure that that company doesn't try and sell it to you
at a higher price later on when you really need it.
So it's your domain name, your signage.
So now let's talk about the other two sections,
the hosting package and the website.
Now these can sometimes be bought separately or done
together as a package. And I understand that as a new business,
sometimes money is a really important factor.
So we'll talk about the least expensive option first,
and it doesn't have bells and whistles.
The least expensive option is to go with Google's website option.
So it does the hosting platform for you and a one page
website. If you're just starting off,
then this is a great option for you because it makes it very simple and gets you
up and running very quickly. And later on,
you could develop into one of the other options,
make sure you grab your custom domain now,
still highly recommend that to be done and with Google and you
can choose it.
And there are some options you can do with getting your email address as well.
So that's the first option for a more developed website.
You could go with an eCommerce site or a third party platform,
such as Shopify, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace,
Etsy,
or big commerce with these you'll set up
your website with that provider on their platform,
and they will have templates to make the design really
easy for you. So they'll get it up and running.
And then they host the website as well.
So they take care of all of the hosting side,
and you don't have to think about that side.
So the pros are that you can actually not have to worry.
As I said about the hosting side of things and that you can get set up pretty
quickly and with easy and very nice templates
on your web design.
The cons are that you don't have as much control.
So you can't do any tweaks yourself to things like SEO.
And unless they're very simple ones,
and generally it costs more to do this method.
So that's your other option is to do a third party
or e-commerce provided solution.
Once again, I've put some links down in the description below.
The do it yourself option is to have your
own custom domain
to utilize a hosting provider and
to use a package called WordPress,
which is a free tool to set up your website yourself,
the website providers that you can utilize, places like SiteGround,
HostGator, GoDaddy and BlueHost.
With
the hosting provider you want to make sure that they have a data centre
in your country. In my case,
it's in Australia and preferably has done data centres overseas so that it
makes it fast for people overseas that are trying to see your information also
means there's backups in the different countries,
but you want your mind provider to be in your country.
So it keeps your data in that country.
You also want it to be fast and I'll put some links in the descriptions on where
you can go and check hosting providers speed.
And I would say, make sure that they include SSL in the package.
So SSL is an extra layer of security over your website,
and it's really kind of mandatory these days for your websites because places
like Google will put up, warning messages and things.
If people go to a website without SSL.
So that'll be another thing that might stop people coming to your website,
and you don't want to stop them in any way.
So you want SSL set up on your website. If it's not included in the package,
you need to check out how much extra it's going to cost you per year to check
your overall price.
And if you are a site that's going to have a lots of photographs.
Then I would also suggest that you get one that includes
CDN and CDN is basically an area where it kind of caches
your images so that they're provided quicker out to sites because
images take a lot of space and,
slow down a website and you don't want your website to be slower.
So I would suggest that you make sure you've got all of those things in place
with your hosting provider. Oh,
and of course you want it to be reasonably priced because it
all comes out of your pocket. I use one called SiteGround.
I prefer SiteGround because all of the package costs are included,
and I've got good speed and very good
support from them. They also make it easy for WordPress sites to be set up.
And that's the next thing we're going to talk about is the WordPress side of
things.
A number of providers will actually have templates for your WordPress set up,
and those templates will have design items in there so
that you can set up your wonderfully beautiful
website very easily.
WordPress is a free tool.
It has a lot of different plugins that you can use.
So if you want things that slide across your screen,
you can get a slider plugin. If you want, a blog,
you get a blog plugin,
it all comes with plugins that you can add in to make up the website
that you want.
The great thing about this option is that you have a lot more options
with your control.
So you can control it in terms of search engine optimization and can do a lot
towards that. So I think that's one of the pros. The other big pro of course,
is the cost. It is a lot cheaper to do it that way,
than doing a third party provider.
But you do have to put the effort in and you do have to
look after a bit more towards the security and hosting side of it.
So if it's time that you've got, then this would be your option.
If you've got the money to spend,
then I would go down the third party route where someone else can look after
things for you,
especially when you're beginning out and remember all of these options,
you can change down the track, and develop into one of the other options.
It may be a project at the time to do the change depending on your
style.
The other thing that I really like about this option is that you usually get
your email as part of the package as well.
On your hosting provider, you can set up your emails,
you can set up as many emails as the provider allows, and you can
set whatever names you want and control it.
So I liked that for that option. So there you are,
there all your options. So in a nutshell,
if you want to get up and running quickly,
have no time and just want something up and running and the least expensive
option you can do, then use Google's website option.
If you're prepared to put in more effort and time to learn how to set up and run
a WordPress site, then the do it yourself.
Option is the option for you and gives you more control.
And if you want as much done for you as possible and are prepared to pay the
extra, then look at a third party platform.
As soon as you have your website up and running,
go and make sure you get your Google, my business free listing.
If you don't know how to do that,
I've got another video showing you on how to do that.
And seriously,
consider looking into search engine optimization for your
website. If you don't know how to do that, I've got some videos on that.
And if you need a hand, you can contact
me@helpmeatautomatenow.com.edu.
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