Posts Tagged ‘wordpress.com’

Web hosting accounts are very inexpensive these days.  Professional web hosting companies may charge a little more than the bargain web hosting accounts, but even those fees are extremely reasonable.

Free Hosting Accounts ($0) – There are free web hosting services such as WordPress.com.  These typically work well for enthusiast sites and many nonprofits.  Most of them do not provide email hosting, have strict limitations to prevent abuse, and may not allow you to use your own domain name.   Servers are typically overloaded.  Support is typically very limited or non-existent.  What do you expect for nothing?

http://www.WordPress.com is excellent for zero budget websites.

Discount Hosting Services ($0-$100/yr) – These are the dominant providers out there.  Companies such as GoDaddy.com, BlueHost.com, and many others all seem to offer ridiculous amounts of space, bandwidth, and other services.  Be aware that every one of these has limits.  The common limitation is on CPU utilization.  If your website is too active, they will shut down your account.  Do you want to learn that the hard way after placing some ads?  Probably not.  They probably will not run backups of your site either, so you better watch out for yourself.  This is a big issue if you use databases which require special steps to backup.

http://www.Godaddy.com is excellent for discounted hosting services.

Commercial Hosting Services ($100-$250/yr) – Commercial hosting companies will typically have better servers that are not overloaded.  Some will have mirrored disks.  Most will run backups.  Most will not have CPU restrictions.  Customer support services will usually be excellent.  While these will cost slightly more, it is well worth it to have a professionally managed server.

http://www.AnythingInternet.com – of course I have to recommend my own company.

Premium Value Added Services ($200/yr and up) – These hosting companies are the type that offer special features that require you to host with them.  Marketing companies might have a special database or a special statistics package.   Companies like this will offer special features, typically industry specific.  These packages are very expensive, but you are paying for the special services.

This category will include services specific to your industry.  Direct sales companies provide these types of websites.  Franchises, financial companies, industry sites, such as www.har.com , or niche market sites such as http://www.clubrunner.com .

Choosing a Hosting Company

Know Your Needs – Do you need email hosting?  Does your website require special database or operating system requirements?  Do you want the company to run backups?  Is your site a high traffic site?  Do you need extreme amounts of online storage?

Contact Technical Support – Do not call the pre-sales number.  Salesmen always answer the phone and make big promises.  Try to call or email the tech support team and ask questions there first.  They are the people you will deal with once your account is open.  Call them or email them a few different times.  Get a feel for them.

Try Different Companies – If you have more than one website, put them with different companies for a while.

Read the Forums – Most web hosting companies have a forum where existing customers chat with each other.  Always read the forums before you sign up.  The customers who are unhappy will be complaining really loudly there.  These are great testimonials.  Of course every company will have unhappy customers, but if you see that dozens of customers are all complaining about the same issue, consider those conversations carefully.

Testimonials from Friends – My least favorite point on this list is asking your friends what they do.  Their needs may be different and they may not be qualified to know they are getting treated poorly.  Ask your friends, but consider the source as you evaluate their advice.

Websites can cost a fortune, or they can be free. I have heard of websites that cost in the millions of dollars to build and require a staff to maintain them. Consider sites like Amazon.com. I would say that most businesses pay a few thousand dollars for their websites. If you are on a tight budget, then spending a few thousand dollars may be impossible. Here are a few ideas that might get you started for nothing, or darn close to nothing.

http://www.myspace.com/ – This is the most popular free website service. Many people identify with MySpace as a hangout for kids. More and more businesses are learning the value of having a presence in the MySpace community. Start paying attention and you will see www.myspace.com/myname plastered on business cards or even on those magnetic car signs. Yes, MySpace is a good choice for a one-page business website. If you cannot figure out how to customize it yourself, ask any teenager to help.

http://www.wordpress.com/ – WordPress is a blogging tool. It is a far more customizable than a MySpace page and you can have as many pages as you like. Because it is a blog, you will have to maintain it by adding new content on a regular basis. You can also point your own domain name to the site if you have one. By using http://www.wordpress.com/, you will not need a hosting account; it is free to use. If you want to download WordPress software onto your own web hosting account, then get the software from http://www.wordpress.org instead. (Notice the ORG instead of COM at the end).

http://www.ning.com – Think of Ning as a more advanced tool that lets you create your very own version of MySpace. Think about it. You can build your own community with registered members, member profiles, blogs, and so on. This is really popular for creating niche online communities. On MySpace, people create a profile page. Your visitors will be able to create profile pages on your Ning site. Basically you become another MySpace. Then you just promote your online community. Building a Ning site is surprisingly easy. This is a great choice if you want to build a community. Maybe you are part of a club or organization and your members would enjoy participating in a niche community site.

If you are willing to do the work yourself, then you can build an elaborate site without spending a dime. Add content to your site using videos from YouTube.com, or use some widgets from other sites. There are numerous content widgets and plug-ins that you can find to put on your site. You can start you own Internet TV station or Internet radio station. All for free.

WHY PEOPLE NEED THIS

Many of our clients are startup companies.  Startup companies usually have the same issues.

1.       They have a tight budget

2.       They will need a lot of changes to their site as they “figure out” their new business

3.       They don’t know what they want

It is a huge business problem for web designers because we want to offer our clients something inexpensive and we know that most customers are disappointed with their first website.  Why are they disappointed?  Because of the reasons listed above.  They do not know what they want; they just know they do not have any money.

On the other side of the coin, our largest customers have so many change requests that are also looking for ways to get more done for lower costs.

There is a solution to all this.  The solution is to use one of many content management systems (CMS).  CMS systems are growing in popularity and many of them are free.

WHAT IS A CMS?

A CMS system is a website construction system that works the day you install it, allows you to customize it nearly every way you could imagine, and makes it easy to update your website yourself using friendly tools built right into your website.

You need a CMS if you are willing to update your own website as long as it is easy to do.

Common CMS tools are available for free.  These free tools always need to be setup and customized and you will have to pay someone to do that work for you.  The costs of setting up a CMS for you could range from as low as $500 to $2500 or more.  It depends on many factors.   Once you are setup, you can easily add new pages, delete pages, and update most of your content yourself.

CMS systems are designed to easily handle very small sites and scale to very large sites quite easily.  My own site, www.AnythingInternet.com, is built on a CMS.  There is no way you can tell by looking at it.  It is much easier to maintain than my old site.  I will never use anything else for my own sites.

POPULAR CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (CMS)

www.joomla.com – Joomla is the most popular system.  It has a lot of add-ons available.  It is a little harder to learn than other systems.  But apparently it’s easy enough because a lot of people use this system.

www.drupal.com – Drupal is easy to use and also very powerful.  It is also easier to customize compared to Joomla.  I really like this system and we use it for many of our projects.  This is what I used for www.AnythingInternet.com and for www.ZeonGlobalEnergy.com.  Check those two sites out and see how different they are.  That tells you how adaptable these systems really are.

www.wordpress.com – The WordPress system is only a blog.  It has less features than Drupal or Joomla, however, most people don’t need the other features and that makes WordPress extremely popular.  It is easy to use and has many great features.  It is a better fit for people interested in the blog style website.

There are many other systems and all have their own strengths and witnesses.  I can find you something easier to use or something with more community features or something with a shopping cart system that is easy to integrate.  Choosing your CMS is an important decision.

Just remember that for most companies a CMS is a good investment.  If your webmaster is unfamiliar with CMS tools, please contact us for a free consultation.