WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT AND HOSTING ARTICLES
Introduction to the World Wide Web
A real beginners guide to having a web presence
Web jargon can be quite intimidating and extremely confusing to anyone not familiar with it and it is easy for someone who works with it
constantly to forget that not everyone spends their lives in cyber-space.
At Web Inn we try to remember that and, if we do happen to have a momentary lapse, there's always this article to cover our tracks. Another helpful resource is our beginner's glossary
The internet is a world that only really differs from our normal world by the fact that it is non-physical. Within it, there are millions of individuals and businesses, all buying and selling, socialising, communicating,
sharing ideas and information. Unlike our physical world however, the internet is not as neatly broken down into geographical areas, which means that
finding all these other people and businesses, especially the ones we are particularly looking for, requires that there must be some other form of identification and compartmentalisation.
This brings us to the first issue of a domain name. "Domain" is just another word for home, or the place where someone or something lives. It is
the same on the internet. The domain name is the name and address you give yourself or your business so that you can be found amongst the millions of other "Paul Smith"'s or "Joe's Cafe"'s of the world.
Domain names are generally written in the format of:
www.something or someone.extension.
Let's break that down.
www (which stands for "world wide web"), followed by a fullstop, then a name or identity( such as paulsmith or Joe's Cafe), again followed by a dot (fullstop) and then followed by what is called an extension. This extension is meant to say more about the location, just as your home address will have a number, street and city, so an internet address has a component which
indicates the country it relates to or the type of organisation it is. the extension "us" for example, indicates a business or
person in the United States while "co.za" indicates South Africa and "co.uk" indicates the United Kingdom. Government
and non-profit addresses normally end with "org" and "com" is generally associated with America.
However, just to keep all of us on our toes, extensions do not necessarily paint an accurate picture, because nothing prevents anyone from
using an address that indicates a country other than their own. I could, for example, be in South Africa, but still have a United States (us or com) address. If you are putting up a business website that hopes to reach an international market, then it may be advantageous not to limit yourself to your own country's extension, but to go with the one that your target market is most likely to associate with your business, in the same way that you may advertise in a magazine you never read, but which your target market does.
So how do we get one of these addresses? It's a bit like registering a business name. First you have to see if the name is still available or if someone else has beaten you to it and this is where it differs from a business registration. Unlike the real world, with the internet you can register domain names even if you are not going to be using them. Also, when a name gets registered, it is not just the name that is registered, but the combination of name and extension. You could therefore find dozens of seperate businesses, all with the exact same name, but
with different extensions. Each one of these will therefore be a unique address, even though the business name is the same in each one.
What sometimes happens is that a business registers its name with every common extension, to ensure that nobody else can access the name. It also means that someone will not accidentally land up with your competitor just because they could not remember the correct extension on your business name.
Ok, I've digressed a little.
So you've checked and seen that
the name you want is still available. The next thing is to register it, which is done online through one of a variety of organisations that manage domain names. Registration fees vary according to the extensions. The name is now yours
for a period of one year, renewable thereafter for an annual fee. This is however just the beginning.
Think of your domain as a mobile home, which means that although it may have a number on the door, people will still not know where to find you. For that, you need somewhere to park it and this is where the concept of hosting comes in.
While your domain is a mobile home, your host would be the caravan park where you set it down and, just like a gypsy, you are free to move from park (host) to park (another host). This isn't exactly advisable because for the period that you are in transit, nobody will be able to find you. Secondly, it takes time to let everyone know your new locale and, just as in real life, you may not even remember half of the people you need to inform. This gets most tricky when you need to let the different search engines and directories know where to find you. More on that when we talk about search engines and directories. For now, let's stick to
the concept of parking at one place for the long term. In internet terms, this is referred to as hosting, which means that your next step is to find a suitable hosting company.
There are hundreds to choose from and by now you have probably seen the numerous ads in the press, on the internet and in various media, advertising ultra-low hosting fees and all sorts of marvellous deals. All I will say on that point at this stage is, be careful: cheap really can be quite nasty when it comes to the internet and all that glitters is definitely not gold. If you are in any doubt at all about who to host with, go with the known, the tried and tested and an organisation who comes recommended. If you're currently looking for a host and not sure where to go, please feel free to email me.
Hosting is normally paid for monthly and the fee will vary according to the hosting company as well as the size of your site. Generally, this can be anything from R75 per month up to R600 or more. One last warning: free websites may be great for a bit of fun and games and some are even fine for securing a
web-presence within somene elses related site, but if you are serious about generating business via the internet, this should be supplimental and not your only website. For more information on how this can in fact end up
hurting your business, take 5 minutes for a quick insight into these peculiar dynamics.
(If you click on the link, it will take you to a new page. To return to this page when you have finished reading, simply click the "back" button at the top of your screen.)
Back to our process: we now have both the domain and our host. Essentially, coming back to our analogy of the mobile home, what we have is a chassis
with a number, parked on a piece of turf. Visitors can now find us, but the place is empty and nobody's home. This brings us to the actual web design. This is a bit like creating a brochure that people can read online and just like any good
brochure, it must look good, feel good, give all relevant information, be user friendly and sell the product. This is your actual website in the making. It is also, sadly, one of the crucial areas in which so many websites fall apart. Sites are far too often badly designed, hard to read, follow no logic and finding the information you want is hugely frustrating. To learn more about what makes a good site, the section on assessing your site is a good
resource.
Sometimes the person who designed the site will also become the webmaster, but this is not always the case. The webmaster is the person who looks after the site on a day-to-day basis and I believe that many people
do not fully understand or appreciate the role of this person. They don't just sit around waiting for something to need fixing, unless this is specifically the full extent of their agreed role. A webmaster worth his or her salt
should however be doing more and should, at the outset, make the full extent of their potential service very clear to you.
Essentially there are two roles they can play: a maintenance man, or a proactive
web manager. The latter service will cost you a bit extra
but if you ignore the actual management of your website, it could result in your investment to that point
being largely wasted. At the end of the day, it all depends on what you expect and want from your site and what you are prepared to pay for.
Assuming that you followed all the guidelines for creating a good site (or selecting the right person to do it for you),
the final stage relates to search engines and directories. However, calling it the final stage incorrectly implies that it is
something you do once and it is done forever, which is nowhere near the reality .... but we'll come back to that in a moment. Let's first look at
phrases like "search engines" and "engine submissions", "META tags", "web spiders" and the like.
Even once you have your amazing site up and running, you are still going to be twiddling your thumbs waiting for clients to
come flocking in. Why? Because although the people who know you now know how to find you (assuming you have told them!),
there are still thousands out there who do not even know you exist. It is your job - or that of your
webmaster/web marketer/SEO (search engine optimiser), to get in their face with your business and product. How is this done? Simple.
When we try to find something on the internet, we use something called a search engine, which is like a
huge internet database that collects information about who is doing what at which sites. Sometimes we use another
creature called a web directory, which is pretty much like the yellow-pages except that it has many categories,
sub categories, sub-sub-categories and so on and so forth. Just to confuse things, some directories look and
act like search engines as well. Whether it is a directory or a search engine, using them is quite simple.
Getting them to come up with your name when someone else is searching is where the challenge comes in and this
is where we start talking about things like META tags and site optimisation. Let's take one at a time.
META tags are like messages written on your website that cannot be seen when anyone looks at your pages. Call it invisible
writing. These messages are there to communicate with the search engines and they
normally do this via spiders or robots.
- More jargon. Very simply, a robot or spider is merely a computer programme that the search engines use to "crawl" the web. In
other words, to move constantly around the web finding information about all the different websites. As they
collect this information, they transmit this back to the search engine, where the information gets added to
the database we spoke of earlier. It is then automatically arranged into the database according to the type of
information it found - the information it got from, amongst other things, your META tags.
Using a very simplistic example, let's say your site is promoting your wholesale bedding
organisation and you provide information
about every kind of blanket, pillow, duvet and anything even remotely associated with bedding.
if your META tags only speak about blankets, then if someone is on the internet searching for sheets, chances are they
will find your opposition long before they even get to know you exist, because the search engine
did not have you listed under sheets, only blankets.
To add to the fun of it all, the different search engines do not all link in to the same vast database and, even more important, they do not all find your site information in the same way. This
means that while you may eventually be found by one search engine, the rest could continue to be totally oblivious to
you. Also, search engines often rely on the directories for their information
and it can take spiders and robots months
to discover your site at all.
Some of the bigger search engines, like Google, entirely ignore your META tags and are concerned predominantly with what is going on inside your site - the visible stuff.
To make sure that you are getting the exposure you need, you therefore need to take the bull by the horns and not
just rely on your META tags and great site content, but physically inform the different directories and search engines about your existence.
This process is what is referred to as site submission or search engine submission. With some engines and
directories the process is relatively simple, with others, you practically need hair on your teeth.
To be more accurate, submitting to search engines is in reality not even neccessary if you are submitting to the important directories, but getting listed on them is essential.
If
you don't have the patience to do it yourself, it may pay you to pay a webmaster, especially as this is
normally not a very large expense. What makes it even more important is the fact that I have given a very simplified version
of the process here, because many factors come into play with regard to being found on the web.
META tags, content, layout, spiders/robots,
directories and manual submissions do not stand as independent components, but interact dynamically with
each other to create a final, overall effect. In addition, as mentioned earlier, search engines all work to
different rules ...... and these rules keep
changing.
This means your efforts in this regard have to be dynamic and ongoing as well or you could find that
where you managed to get to the top of the list on one day, you fall to number 500 the next. This is called ranking
and is a never-ending challenge for sites.
By the way, before you go changing your name to
"AAAAAAAJoe's Cafe" I should mention that search engines do not list sites alphabetically, but in order
of relevance ... which is determined by (in some cases) your META tags, the number of other sites who are linked
to you, your site content and even your site design. Unless you come up in the first 10 or 20 results when someone searches for your product, chances are they will
not even see you. In a nutshell, ranking is everything and this is what the whole fuss is about at the end of the
day.
To summarise: Your internet name and address is referred to as your domain name. The place where this is
kept on the web is your address and the actual location of this is provided by a hosting company. Your site is the equivalent of your brochure, which, if poorly put
together, won't be read for very long, let alone provoke the desired response.
Once you have your domain, site and
host, the next thing you need is to ensure that people find you. This is done by optimising your site, which should have formed
part of the initial development process. It includes the actual format, the content and the invisible text called META
tags. These "tags" are used by search engine techno-lackys,
called robots or spiders, who come creeping around
behind the scenes (crawling the web) to find new sites and site updates for the search engines. Given the size of the web, they
can however take months to find you and unless you are happy to wait for that to happen, you need to
submit your site to directories yourself. This in itself is still not enough. You don't just want to appear - you want to appear
at or near the top of the list. Where you appear on the list is called your ranking .... and ranking is
the thing that aggressive web management is all about.
If nothing else, you now know why geeks don't talk English: it's because they have to spend all their time in this wierd and wonderful universe called the internet.
To find out more about how we work with regard to the various issues mentioned here, visit our services section, and
if you still have any unanswered questions, please feel free to
contact us.
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