Detailed Getting Started Guide
From MDSupportWiki
This is a detailed "Getting Started" guide targeted specifically towards small and medium businesses. However, if you are making your own personal website you can still learn a lot.
Contents |
3 easy steps
To get your business up on the web, you need 3 things:
- A domain name
- A website
- A hosting account to store your website on
A domain name
You can think of a domain name as your address on the Internet. In real life, when someone needs to contact you they send you a letter with your physical address written on the envelope. On the internet, they simply type your domain name into their browser to find you.
What does the .com mean?
A URL (website address) is composed of three sections - the www at the start, the domain name in the middle, and the namespace at the end. Here are a few examples:
- www.mdwebhosting.com.au
- www.google.com
- www.sourceforge.net
The www simply means your website is part of the world wide web. You can register your domain with many different namespaces. The type of namespace is meant to suggest what sort of website you are viewing:
- .com for commercial websites
- .net for internet websites
- .biz another namespace for businesses
- .info for general information websites
- .org for organisations and non-profits
- .com.au for Australian businesses or companies
- .net.au for Australian businesses or companies
- .org.au for Australian non-profits
In reality, anyone can register any domain, and for any purpose. To stop abuse of this system the Australian government put special restrictions on the .au namespace to make sure that only Australian businesses with an ACN or ABN were able to register them.
Once you have picked a memorable domain name you would be well advised to register it in all the above namespaces - more than a few times, a business has registered their domain in only .com and then find that a competitor has stolen the name in other namespaces!
Picking a memorable domain name
Your domain name should be memorable, quirky, unique, or related to your company activities or services it provides. There are two strategies:
- Make a domain name directly relevant to your main activity. For example, you have a dog washing business, and try and register www.dogwashing.com
- Make a domain that is not related to your business at all, but is quirky or fun. Who would know that Google and Yahoo are search engines just by glancing at the domain name?
Whatever strategy you choose is up to you. Once you have registered your domain name, you need to purchase a hosting account.
Registering variations
It has been reported that Arnold Schwarzenegger registered 28 variations of his own name in several namespaces, so that no-one would create a biographical website about him. The lesson here is clear - if you have a domain with a common misspelling you should also register the variation in each namespace. Imagine typing googel.com (instead of the correct spelling, google) and being redirected to a porn site - how much damage do you think that might cause a company?
You could also consider registering other keywords that are relevant to your business operations.
Creating redirects
If you have purchased several domains it is a good idea to set up redirects so that they all point to the same website. MD has just such a service, URL Redirect. That way, you won't need to make a separate website for each domain name.
What If I already have a domain name?
Don't sweat, you can still use your existing domain name with our services! We have a domain names section which has articles about transferring your domain name over to MD. The process differs depending on what type of domain you have. Alternatively, you can let your existing registrar keep on managing your domain, purchase just a hosting account with us, and make the domain work with your new hosting package by changing the nameserver settings at your existing registrar.
Hosting your website
The second part of putting your website on the internet involves getting a hosting account, which allows you to store your website on one of our fast webservers. When someone types in your domain name into their browser, their request is routed through the internet until it finally reaches our webserver. Because these requests travel at the speed of light these are done pretty fast! The webserver will then send a copy of your website back to the person who wants to look at it.
The type of hosting package you pick will depend on your business requirements:
- If you have a lot of local clients you should consider a locally hosted Aussie plan. Your webserver will be located in our Melbourne data-centre, and Aussie clients will experience really fast load times.
- If you need heaps of bandwidth and disk space you would go for a US Full Featured hosting plan. Bandwidth (the amount of data you can transfer every month) is really cheap abroad, so we are able to offer a lot of it to our clients for a low cost.
- If you are planning on selling products online, your best bet would be an eCommerce package, which comes complete with a shopping cart and the software required to connect to a bank merchant gateway.
- Finally, if you have a big complex website or get a lot of hits, you would probably need a Virtual or Dedicated Server. A server gives you your own dedicated hardware to do whatever you need with it.
The billing cycle
At MD, you are not locked into an annual billing cycle - you can always pay month by month. However, if you do choose a yearly cycle, you receive a free domain name with your hosting package. We also run a lot of specials every month, so chances are you will receive a big discount for choosing a longer billing cycle. However at the end of the day the choice is up to you!
Getting your website designed
Once you have picked a hosting package, you will need to get your website designed. Your options here are:
- Using our free MD Sitebuilder website building package and create your website from a template
- Designing and coding your website from scratch
- Getting our design team to create a professional site design
If you do want a site that looks professional (or if you need ecommerce functionality) options 2 or 3 are your best bet. We also understand that small businesses may need to be very budget conscious about their expenditure, so we have also written some basic tutorials on coding your first website from scratch. . Whatever option you choose, eventually your website will be ready to upload to the web.
Uploading your website
If you chose to code your own site, you will eventually need to upload your website to your webserver. You can read the previous article on basic website creation, as this provides a guide. Alternatively, there is a more detailed guide available in this wiki-knowledgebase titled Uploading files to your webserver.
Marketing your website
Ok, so you've registered a great domain, built or purchased a website, and have it ready to go on your webserver. How do you market your website and let people know that it exists? First of all, make sure you include your URL (for example, www.yourdomain.com) on all your stationery. Put it on your business cards, your memos, faxes, internal and external correspondence, on your shop window, your car window, in ad campaigns...put it everywhere! This gives people a chance to visit your site at their own leisure, especially if they are interested in your own products or services.
The second way is by word of mouth - tell all your friends, family, acquaintances, employees and trading partners. Word can spread very quickly about a great website. If your business is locally based consider writing an article for your local newspaper and sneaking in your URL somewhere in the article.
The third (and perhaps most important) is advertising your website on the web itself! When people type in keywords in a search engine such as Google, you want to make sure that your website comes out on top for those keywords. The difference between a poor and a top position in a Google search can be the difference between a thousand and a million visitors coming to your website every month! There are a few ways you can do this:
- Submit your site to search engines. Most search engines let you submit your own site to their index. However, this process is not instantaneous and your site may not appear in search results for several weeks
- Have lots of unique and interesting content on your website. Your search engine ranking will increase if your website is full of relevant content.
- Look at doing some Google or Yahoo marketing. Basically, you select what keywords you want to associate with your website - when someone searches for that keyword, your website will appear in the paid/sponsored section of the website search as a text advertisement. You pay only when someone clicks your ad (as opposed to just looking at it) so this form of advertising is considered very relevant and contextual. You can even sort your ad campaigns by country, region or city (for example, displaying local ads only to a local audience).
Of course, getting on top of the search engine ranking is very tricky - there can only be one company on top, and literally thousands of other companies want the same position. If you aren't getting anywhere fast you can also consider using our SEO/Marketing services. We have full time experts whose sole job is to increase your position in search engines:
- Our basic package is the Search Optimiser. We analyse your site and provide a comprehensive report detailing exactly how to improve your listing in the search engine.
- You can also choose the 6 month Search Commander program. Every month you receive a detailed report on your progress, with a step by step guide on what to do next to improve your position. We even take off the cost of the Search Optimiser if you chose that first.
Google Advertising
Our experts are also very good at paid placement text advertising in Google (Google searches are responsible for about 1/2 of all search results worldwide). Why wait several months for your position to improve in the natural (non paid) search results when you can get results immediately. Of course, you can start your own Google Ad Campaigns without any expert help, but consider this:
- What are the best keywords to use - what will users type into the search engine most often? What keywords are the most likely to entice users to click my ad?
- How should i word my ads to promote my product effectively?
- What ad campaigns should I run, and which target markets should I target? And what times are the most effective to advertise?
- Very importantly, what is my budget? What is the most efficient cost per click level, and how do i calculate the level which gets me the best results at the lowest price?
- How do I get my ad to appear above my competitors, who are obviously also trying to get the best position in the paid placements (you don't want their ad to appear above yours do you?).
We have experts that grapple with these issues all day long and know all the special tricks to advertise effectively on Google. If you'd like, you can find out more about our Google AdPro service and what you get.
Conclusion
We hope you found our detailed Getting Started guide to be of some use. If you have any questions or comments then let us know.
