FAQs About Creating your Website
Below are answers to common questions I receive from people who want to create their first website.
Before You Build Your Site
1. Your website is your business card to the multitude of people who are online searching for the product or service you are offering.
2. After your customers find your product or service, your website will allow them to contact you easily and quickly you via your channel of choice (email, phone or fax).
3. Your website is accessible to your current and future customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
4. A quality website adds credibility to your business (and badly designed website will hurt your credibility).
5. Your website allows you to introduce yourself to your customers in an image rich and descriptive way.
6. Your website allows business owners to reveal their personal side and or community activities engendering trust and loyalty in their customers.
7. In today’s business environment, ALL BUSINESSES are expected to have an online presence. This expectation will only increase.
8. Your website is an extremely useful tool for answering your customers Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).
9. To enhance and extend all printed marking materials with a link to your website.
10. Your website is the cornerstone of any current or future online marketing campaigns
The four easy steps below will guide you in the direction of a professionally designed, developed and marketed website.
- Domain Name (URL) Registration — This is the address people will use to access your website (www.yourcompany.com) once you have determined that the URL you wish to use is available. A domain name needs to be renewed every year.
- Design of the website — This is where the look, feel, and content of the website are determined and created, either from scratch by designing from the ground up (which I don’t do), or by using a pre-built theme (which I do) that is configured to your business.
- Hosting your website on a Web Server — This is basically where you rent space on a computer that is always connected to the Internet. Price will vary, depending on the amount of disk space you will have and the connection to the Internet, but I use Dreamhost exclusively unless you have a preferred host.
- Marketing your website — What if you build a website and nobody came? You should be thinking about the marketing of your website as it is being designed and configured. The content of the site needs to reflect the search terms if you want your site to appear on search engines. This area is called SEO (see below).
- Domain name (a yearly fee around $10 US)
- Web hosting (a monthly fee) The price will vary depending on how far in advance you pay for your site. Generally if you pay for domain names years in advance (instead of year by year) you’ll get a better deal. The standard hosting cost on Dreamhost is $8.95 US/mth but paid for a full year in advance. They run frequent promotions with various partners.
- Website Design- This is a one time fee to build & configure your website and make it live online. Prices start from $299 US for the basic 5 page site.
- Website Maintenance- This is optional as the CMS sites I provide are enabled for you to do your own updates (with a little coaching from me). Beyond that costs extra and depends on how much work is involved but typically I bill an hourly rate.
Getting Traffic to Your Website
- Referrals- Good old fashioned “Word of mouth.” It’s free and if people can recommend your site that makes it even more credible.
- Great Content- The more useful and unique you can make your site, the more others will want to bookmark and tell others about it. The biggest mistake people make when building their sites is lack of content. You just have to give people a reason to return.
- Search Engines/Directories- The search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.) and online directories are another great place to promote your site and some of them are free.
- Social Media Marketing- Ever hear about Facebook? Even Facebook recognized the commercial power of social media and created Business Fan Pages for companies to set up their own profiles and interact with their customers.
- Email Marketing- Even you don’t like getting spammed- unsolicited email clogging your inbox each day, but you’d opt-in, i.e. choose who you’d like to receive emails from if they’re of interest to you right? Then obtain your customers’ email addresses and craft campaigns they’ll want to sign up for.


