Category: Designing Your Website

In order to have a website for your company, you typically need to have three things:

1. A domain
2. A web host
3. Your coded website files

Domain

As soon as you know the name of your company, you will want to start looking into a domain name, or what a user will type into their web browser to get to your site.  Generally, your domain name should be short and to the point.  There are two reasons for this:

1. You want people to easily get to your site and short names are the easiest to remember
2. This will most likely be your email address, so it should be easy to say and spell for others

For example, if your company name is “Betty Brown’s Cupcakes”, you may want to look into purchasing the domain “BBCupcakes.com”.  Some companies purchase multiple domain names and have them all forward to the main domain.  Using the cupcake company as an example, they may purchase “bettybrownscupcakes.com” as well as “bbcupcakes.com”.  Then they could have “bettybrownscupcakes.com” forward automatically to “bbcupcakes.com”.  This way, their customers are able to type the company name into the address bar and still arrive at the company’s main site.

A domain is normally purchased by year through a domain provider, but multiple years can be purchased as well, sometimes with a small per year discount.  The domain provider should provide a control panel that will allow you to configure your web host and email settings.

Web Host

Once you have a domain, you will need a space upon which to put your website.  This is where a web host comes in.  A web host will provide space on a server for you to put your site files.  They should assign you an IP address or server address, which you will need to enter in your domain settings.  This way, when your domain name is typed in a browser, the browser looks to the domain provider, who provides the server where your website sits.  The browser then looks at that server and is able to display your web page.

Website files

Once you have your structure in place for hosting your site, you will need an actual website to go on it.  To create your site, you will want to speak with a web design company about the best options for you.  They should go over site structure, content and framing as well as many other things that go into the creation of a website.

Bonus: SSL Certificate

It is highly recommended that an SSL certificate be purchased for your site to protect your site visitors.  For more information on SSL certificates, please see IFTS’ blog entry on SSLs.

Please see our blog entry next time on “My Site is Up and Running, so Now What?”

Previously, the popular opinion on SSL certificates was that the only sites that needed them were ones that collected personally identifiable information (such as a social security number), had a login feature or had a shopping cart/check out function (such as online banking, eBay or PayPal).

SSL stands for “Secure Sockets Layer” and it encrypts the connection between the client and server when browsing a website.  This is important because it makes the information that the user inputs on your website unreadable to anyone except your server.  It also makes your site more difficult to impersonate, and thus, your customers are less susceptible to phishing schemes.

An easy way to tell that an SSL certificate is being used on a website is an “https” in front of the domain name in the address bar.  Additionally, the browser will typically display a lock icon in the address bar or it will turn the address bar green.  According to this blog article by Google Webmaster Trends Analysts, Google is now looking for all websites to have SSL certificates.  They have called for “HTTPS everywhere on the web” to make the internet a safer place.  In fact, whether or not your site has an SSL certificate is now in their search-ranking algorithm.  This algorithm decides the order that webpages show up on Google results.  Therefore, to have a website perform to its highest standard, an SSL certificate is required.

How do I get an SSL certificate and how much will it cost?

To have an SSL certificate installed on your website, talk to your website hosting company.  They should be able to install the certificate and redirect your web traffic to the secure site.  This way, even if the non-secure version of your site is typed in the browser, visitors will be redirected seamlessly to the secure version.  In addition, you should resubmit your sitemap to Google and ensure that the default version of your domain that Google displays in the search results is the one protected by your SSL.

The annual cost of an SSL certificate can range from around fifty dollars to thousands.  The expensive certificates have a greater degree of encryption, have a greater brand recognition (e.g. Symantec), and are generally used when protecting social security numbers or banking information.  For a small to medium-sized business looking to protect their site visitors, one of the less expensive certificates should suffice as long as it uses 2048-bit key certificates.  Again, this is something to discuss with your webhost.