Looking to get the face of your small business online? Well, for over a decade I have been helping clients do just that by creating a manageable web presence using open source platforms such as Joomla and WordPress. Over time WordPress has become the default Content Management System (CMS) chosen due to it’s ease of use, speed, great look and growing market of plugins and templates. This awesome platform allows you to design and maintain an experience for visitors that will match the intention of your business.
It’s easy to get started and only takes a few minutes to begin the process of showing the world what your company is all about. Most web hosts can make the first steps pretty painless by allowing you to both register a domain name of your choosing, and also setup the hosting for it in one spot. These two services are typically very inexpensive when using something called shared hosting, averaging about $80 per year combined.
What’s a domain name?
A domain name is the friendly word or phrase that gets used to identify your web page. Underneath the surface something called an IP address is used to actually find resources on the internet, but since we all know most of us won’t memorize a long series of numbers for every single site we want to visit it’s easier to use names. DNS servers translate those friendly names to their corresponding numbers so we don’t have to. Yes!
Example: if you wanted to visit Intel’s company website and check out their latest products you could bring up a browser window and type in intel.com, or you could type in the IP Address associated with that website. Currently it’s 198.175.116.54
Go ahead, try it.
When you register with a hosting provider DNS is used to match your domain name to an address assigned to one of their servers. If they decide to change that server the IP Address may change but your friendly name doesn’t. And, if you decide to change hosting providers your name stays the same but DNS is again used to match it to a series of numbers corresponding to the server run by the other company. Visitors never have to remember anything but your super cool domain name!
Once you have a name and host I work with you on the basic framework to help get the website running and make sure the look and feel, from colors to graphics, suites your needs.
It can seem like a daunting task but with my help we can have you going in no time. Call and setup a consultation to get started.
Here are the hosting providers I can currently recommend because I work with their services quite a bit:
