A Beginners Guide to finding your perfect Web Hosting Provider

Are you just starting a web site or thinking about what the process is? This Beginners Guide is designed to explain the process (in general terms) of designing a web site to promoting your finished web site once it is online, and all the steps in between. If you are unsure of certain terms or need some more information on a concept please refer to our Glossary. This article is an overview. More detailed articles are (and will be) available for certain topics talked about in this guide. Links to these articles will be listed in the topics below.

We will assume you have an idea for your web site. Usually web sites fall into two categories, a Business Web Site and a a Hobby Web Site. The process of creating either of these two types is the same with the exception of time being an important factor for business sites and most hobby web site owners usually do not pay for promoting their web site (more on this later).

Domain Names

The first thing you need to do is acquire a domain name for your web site. A domain name must be unique and should reflect the theme and probably the name of your web site. You should pick your domain name fairly soon in your process since the one you want most likely will be taken and you will have to settle for one of your secondary choices. A Domain Name can be registered at any number of domain name registrars like Yahoo. Most web hosting providers offer domain name registration services.

Design an Creating a Web Site

First off, you obviously probably have some ideas here on how your web site will look, what information will be displayed and what internet surfers will be able to do on the site. It is also a good idea to check out your competition to see their sites and what they offer. You might get a few useful ideas from them and see what works and what does not.

Your next step is to figure out how to create your new web site. Most business sites will hire a web design company to help design and create the new site since most owners don't have the time or knowledge to create one themselves. This is a good choice since your site will reflect your business and someone in the business of creating web sites will know what works in terms of layout design, graphic design and functionality. For the most part creating a business web site costs will range from $2,000 to $20,000 depending on features, amount of graphics, etc. These costs includes web sites for small and average size businesses. Larger business web sites like the one for Dell Computers would cost in the millions.

Hobby sites have a few more options. Most create their own sites since their budget is minimal or non-existent. To do this you will need a WYSWYG editor. There are many popular WYSWYG editors out there that allow you to create sites based on your own design or templates. With most templates, all you have to is type in the text and add your logo graphic. The problem with using templates is that most likely there will be other sites out there that use the same template. Not a big deal for most people but id does mean your site is not completely unique. Popular WYSWYG editors include Microsoft Frontpage and Adobes Dreamweaver. Just remember creating your own web site will take some time and there is a learning curve to it. As you learn more on designing web sites you can then always update your own.

Choosing a Web Host Provider

Most web sites start off fairly simple and as they grow and evolve, they become larger and more complex. When this happens your web hosting needs may change. There are 2 main types of web hosting available, Shared Hosting and Dedicated Hosting. The difference being, with Shared Hosting you are sharing the same server with one or more other web sites. You are completely independent from these sites and no one surfing to your site will know it's on a shared server. You just will be sharing the servers resources like memory, processing power and the network connection. This is not usually a bad thing, most web sites are on a shared server. Dedicated Hosting is most likely only needed when you have thousands of people visiting your site every day. If you site ever reaches this need you then can switch to a dedicated server. There is no need to start with a dedicated server and it will only cost you money in the long run.

Advertising your Web Site

The first thing you should do for all new web sites is submit them to both Google and Yahoo. The faster you can get your site into these major search engines the faster you will have visitors. Of course it can take a few weeks before the search engines visit your site plus another few weeks before they start sending visitors. The amount of visitors sent will initially be small. Once you develop your site more and get other sites linking to your site (making your site more important) the search engines should hopefully display your links higher on the search results, thereby sending you more visitors.

Another way to get visitors right away would be to pay for sponsored listings on these search engines. They appear on the same page as the normal search results and depending on how much you pay for a click and the keywords used for a search, this will mostly determine the location of your sponsored listing. Cost per click (CPC) usually runs between $0.01 to $2.00 with some premium spots worth over $10 per click (depending on the search keywords). On average though most clicks cost between $0.10 and $0.25. Yahoo! Sponsored Search and Google Adwords are your best choice for Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising since they are the largest search engines and there quality of visitors is the best.

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