Creating A Website
I've started to look at
information on how to set up a website and the important stages I need to
address for it to be successful. The information I find will make me more informed
for when I actually do set one a professional website in the summer.
Domain name
A domain name is the name you
give to your website, so it is vitally important that it links in with your
company or what is on your website. To get a domain name, you have to pay an
annual fee to a registrar for the right to use that name. Naming your site
after your domain name is very important. You want everything to reflect your
business and it makes it easier for people to remember you. If your not easy to
remember then people won't revisit or recommend your website, so potentially
you could loose business.
Web Host
Web host is basically a
company that has many computers connected to the Internet. When you place your
web pages on their computers, everyone in the world will be able to connect to
it and view them. You will need to sign up for an account with a web host so
that your website has a home. If getting a domain name is analogous to getting
a business name in the brick-and-mortar world, getting a web hosting account is
analogous to renting office premises for your business.
Free Hosting:
The criteria for choosing a free web host and a commercial web hosting solution
are slightly different although they do overlap. Free web hosting will often
contain advertising to cover the cost of "renting the space to you".
The extent of the advertising will range from a little box in the comer of the
screen, or can be as bad as a range of annoying pop ups. So it is important to
look into the different companies that offer free hosting, as some might be
more professional than other. Web space and file size will often be restricted
as they are offering a limited service. Speed of connection is another thing
I've found you need to appreciate; the free services are generally slower,
which may put people off if they have to wait for your site to load. The main
thing to consider is, if you have a free website you will have a sponsored
domain name, I.E. www.yourdomain.piczo.com
this effectively makes a free website less professional.
Commercial Web Hosting: Basically as you're paying for the service you
generally get fast bandwidth (connection speed), no advertising, high disk
capacity etc.
"If you ate paying for a
site, you really should make sure you have all of these.
Note that some commercial
hosts do not allow you to install PHP or Perl scripts without their approval.
This is not desirable since it means that you have to wait for them before you
can implement a feature on your site. ".htaccess" is needed if you
are to do things like customize your error pages (pages that display when, say,
a user requests for a nonexistent page on your site) or to protect your site
in various ways (such as to prevent bandwidth theft and hotlinking, etc).
Telnet or SSH access is
useful for certain things, including testing certain scripts (programs),
maintaining databases, etc. MySQL ("What is MySQL?") is needed if you
want to run a blog or a content management system. Cron is a type of program
scheduler that lets you run programs at certain times of the day (eg, once a
day). Check to see if these facilities are provided" - http://wW\Y. thcsitewizard.com/archive/findhost.html
Your often provided with an
e-mail address with the same domain as your website. For example, zoeyroberts@zoeyrobertsphotography.com,
which is obviously more professional to the clients and is definitely something
worth considering.
Looking at the type of sever
your going to pay to use is important. Whether you think so or not on the
theoretical level, there are a few practical reasons for looking out for the
type of server.
In general, if you want to
use things like write/use ASP programs, you have no choice but to look for a
Windows server. Otherwise my preference is to sign up for accounts using the
often cheaper, more stable and feature-laden Unix systems running the Apache
server. In fact, if dynamically generated pages that can access databases (etc)
is what you want, you can always use the more portable (and popular) PHP
instead of tying yourself down to ASP. Another reason to prefer Unix-based web
hosts (which include web hosts using systems like Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris,
etc) using the Apache web server is that these servers allow you to configure a
lot of facilities that you typically need on your site (error pages, protecting
your images, blocking email harvesters, blocking IP addresses, etc) without
having to ask your web host to implement them.
The cost is also another
benefiting factor that you be considered so shop around!
Creating a webpage
The webpage needs to look
professional so you can either look for templates (which you can pay for and
customise yourself) OR you can pay a web designer to create one for you. Make
sure you look at lots of photography web sites so that you can consider the key
elements to a successful one. Personally I feel that the key elements to a
photography website are:
That the website is minimal
Exceptionally structured
(clearly laid out etc)
My thoughts:
From my research I feel that
a free website will be inadequate for when I'm hunting for freelance work.
However I've been looking into template websites (due to the basic nature of
photography web sites I didn't feel I needed to pay for one to be designed) and
I've come across WIX.com, their websites allow to adapt flash templates to be
very personal. They also give you the option to actually change your website
from being a free website to a hosted website as they own their own sever. So I
will be able to create a website now for free, edit and adapt it as I please
and then when I'm ready I can just change the host type and pay a subscription.
So I will be starting a WIX website very soon!
