Website Basics

This section of our website has been designed to give the beginner an overview of what a website is, and what things you should consider when planning a website.

When planning a website, you need to decide why you want to publish a website.

• For fun
• For financial gain
• Informational
• Generate new customers
• Sell products or services
   

Once you are clear in your own mind what you would like your website to achieve, then you can begin to consider how your website will help you reach your goal.

There are three costs to consider when setting up a website are:-

• The design fee
• The domain name fee
•  Web hosting fees

Domain Names

The domain name you choose is the text people will enter into a web browser to open your website, ours is albany-computers.co.uk.  Your domain name should either reflect your company, or the type of website you are creating. For example, we also own albanymarketing.co.uk, albany-hosting.co.uk and computerrepairsrotherham.co.uk to name but a few. 

The domain names end with a certain type of extension, .co.uk, .com, .net etc...  see Domain Names on our website for a full list of domain types we can provide.
Different domain types have different costs, for example a .co.uk from us costs £12.50 inc vat for two years.  While a .com is £12.50 inc vat for one year.  Other domains types are more expensive.

When considering the type of domain name you would like, consider where your audience will come from.  If you are opening a shopping website where you will only be selling to the UK market, go for a .co.uk.  If your site will sell to any location then go for a .com.

Hosting

Your website needs to sit on a computer attached to the internet.  This is called hosting. 

There are predominantly three types of hosting available:-

• Shared hosting
• Dedicated Hosting
• Your Own server

If you have the expertise you can set up your own web server, we will not be discussing this type of hosting here.

Shared hosting is the cheapest type of hosting package.  When your website is on a shared host, your website will share the same computer as other website.  While this is ideal for small websites it can cause you website to be a little sluggish sometimes, especially at peak times if the server has websites that are popular.

Some companies will limit the amount of space your website can occupy, and some will even limit the number of times you website can be accessed in a month, this is called bandwidth limitations.  On our shared hosted websites we do not limit you on anything, ours is an unlimited hosting package.

Dedicated hosting as the name suggests, will hold only your website.  You will have a dedicated computer attached to the internet with only your website.  A dedicated web server will probably cost you 15 x more than a shared web server, so should only be considered for busy websites.