The Beginner's Guide to Internet Technology

“I need a website: now what?”

Congratulations! If you're reading this guide, you are probably close to making the decision to create a website, and you want to know what you're getting into.

Websites on the Internet range in cost from a hundred or so dollars to multiple millions. To try to explain the difference, and what goes into different kinds of websites, it's easiest to break the process of developing a web presence into a few different steps. These steps are enumerated here; we will tackle them one-by-one afterward.

• Domain Names
• Hosting
• Design
• Development
• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media

Domain Names

A domain name is the www.something.com that people type into their web browser to actually visit your site. Every computer connected to the Internet is identified by a unique address, known as an IP address. IP addresses take the form 192.168.0.1, where each number between the dots can range from 0 to 255.

If you wanted to direct someone to your website, it would be quite a drag to have to say "hey, check out my new blog at 22.52.173.67." Nobody would remember the numbers. So people have come up with a technology called DNS, which essentially maps domains to IP addresses. So now you can just tell someone, "check our my new blog at something.com".

When you register a domain name, you pay a small fee to a domain registrar, which keeps a directory of domains and IP addresses accessible via public DNS servers. Then, when someone tries to visit something.com, that person's computer can talk to the DNS server, something like this:

Client: hey, do you know where something.com is?
DNS Server: sure, it's at 87.45.209.152
Client: ok, thanks. I'm off to 87.45.209.152.

It depends on the domain registrar and the TLD you're registering, but domain registration typically costs around $10-$15 per year.

For marketing purposes, you want to pick your domain name carefully. Here are some tips:

• Choose a .com or .org domain if you possibly can - once you start picking less common ones like .biz or .us, nobody's going to remember it.
• You want to choose a domain name people will easily remember. To that end, try to make it short, easy to spell, and catchy.
  Some good examples:

  www.frisco.com

  www.facebook.com

  www.lulu.com

  
  and some bad examples:

  www.sjal.com

  www.12muffins.com

  www.todds-lawn-mowing-service.net

• There are hundreds of articles on the web about how to pick a good domain name. Just Google choosing a good domain name and you will find many.

As you're picking a domain name, you can run a WHOIS query to find out if a certain domain is available. If it is, you can go ahead and order it from a domain registrar. If not, you may have to pick another domain name. In some cases, a domain may already be registered, but the current owner may be willing to sell it - such domains usually say so prominently when you visit them, but they're often VERY expensive.

Lastly, remember that you can register as many domains as you want. For example, Google owns gogle.com, google.com, gooogle.com, and many common misspellings or typos of Google (like foofle.com). All of these redirect to the main Google homepage. You might want to do this if you think people will misspell your domain name, or if you're worried about competitors/scammers buying domains similar to your own.

Web Hosting

The way the Internet works is that there are two kinds of computers: servers and clients. Servers are big powerful machines that typically run all the time. They serve web pages and files to clients, which are comparatively dinky computers like a personal laptop or PC.

In theory, you could turn any computer into a server, and for example run your website from a laptop in your home. The problem is that servers need to be constantly monitored for hardware failure, software problems like viruses, and suspicious activity. So - most people elect to rent space on a server owned by a company known as a web host. Web hosts typically keep hundreds of servers in a warehouse (a data center), and hire a few gurus to monitor them 24x7. That way you can rest assured that your website is available on the Internet at all times.

When you buy hosting from a web host, you're basically paying for the resources you use - the memory to store all your website's files, and the time the server spends sending files to clients, running scripts, sending emails, and the like.

A small website that uses little memory and has few visitors can survive on a very basic hosting plan - often costing as little as $5 - $10 per month. As your website grows, includes more files (and large files like audio and video), and gets more visitors, you may need to upgrade your hosting plan. Below is a list of the sort of "tiers" of web hosting that are commonly available, with an approximate price range:

Tier	Best suited for	Type	Price Range
Entry	Small business or personal website	Shared	$5 - $10 / mo
Mid-level	Medium business or organization	VPS	$30 - $50 / mo
Enterprise	Large business or personal website	Dedicated	$200 - $500 / mo
Corporate	Large corporation or online community	Multiple dedicated	$1000s / mo

Really big companies like Google and Facebook just buy, staff, and run their own data centers, each with easily hundreds of servers.

So, how to know which hosting plan to get? Getting an entry level package is fine for most folks, especially because many web hosts let you upgrade should that become necessary. BUT - if you plan to include a lot of big files in your website (like thousands of large images, or hundreds of audio or video files), you may need another package.

A word of caution before we move on: there are many web hosts out there, and they vary in price, reliability, customer service, and uptime. It's a good idea to shop around and get some recommendations: don't just buy from anyone! (If you want to contact us we can make some recommendations.)

Web Design

Once you've picked out hosting and a domain name, it's time to start thinking about the design of your website.

A website's design is the sort of "look" that people immediately recognize as your site. A design consists of a bunch of concrete elements, like color, shapes, and fonts, but also more subtle elements like shadow, texture, and icons. These subtle items are often what makes a design unique. How many websites are there with a blue-and-white color scheme, and yet they can look wildly different - compare facebook.com to paypal.com, for instance. As they say, the devil is in the details.

It's often easy to consider your own preferences when designing a website, but also remember to think about the tastes and preferences of the intended audience of your site. Your favorite color may be lavender, but if your website sells motorcycles, it's probably not a good idea to make lavender the primary color. That provides a nice segue into our first design topic: color.

Most web designers like to create a palette of 2-5 specific colors they can use to design a site. Using a small, fixed number of colors gives the site a unified, interesting look. When choosing your colors, think about what you're trying to do with the site: a school might want to use bright primary colors, a hunters' association could use dark natural tones. In general, dark colors appeal to men, light colors appeal to women, and bright colors appeal to children (of course this is a broad generalization). If you already have a logo, you probably want to start with the colors in that. There's not really a right or wrong way to pick colors, just find something visually appealing.

Another important part of a website is typography. Unfortunately, fonts are not yet very standardized across the web (although people are working on it). For text that will never change (like a logo or slogan) you can use any font you want, in an image, to make sure visitors will see it correctly. For text that changes often, you don't want to have to make a whole new image every time. But if the visitor doesn't have the right fonts installed, they may not see your site as you intended. In any case you can choose the "family" of font you want the site to use - sans serif, serif, script, monospace, etc.

There are many other elements that go into a design: round, square, or jagged corners; backgrounds and textures; shadows and reflections; a raised 3D look or a flat minimalist look. All of these are subtle, but can make a marked impression at first glance.

From a designer's perspective, it's great to be given lots of artistic license to just come up with something attractive. The problem is that design is subjective, and what's attractive to one person may not be to another. That's why it's imperative for a designer to get detailed input from the client.

Reitz Internet often asks clients to fill out a design worksheet - a form that asks a bunch of questions pertaining to website design. Filling this form out helps clients to solidify their ideas, as well as helping us to understand what you want.

Software Development

Development refers to the process of creating software for a website that will accomplish some desired function.

Some sites need no development - if they merely display static information. Others perform complex functions: collecting data through forms, storing the data in databases, manipulating the data with algorithms, displaying the data in an easy-to-read format, performing actions like sending an email, and interacting with other web-based software services (like twitter or foursquare).

The range of things you might want your website to do is huge, and Reitz Internet believes that almost nothing is impossible. For some applications, an available software package may work best. For others, we might need to write code from scratch. But making websites do innovative things is our specialty.

Below is a list of some of the types of software we've set up in the past. Hover over each one to see more info.

• Content Management Systems
• Forums, guestbooks, chatrooms
• Email blast software, automated messaging systems
• Media libraries and players
• Maps and geolocation applications
• User login and permissions systems
• File uploading/sharing systems
• Image galleries
• Appointment scheduling and calendar software
• Shopping cart systems
• Paypal and merchant gateway payment processing
• Wikis and blogs

Search Engine Optimization

Ooooh... we said it. Search Engine Optimization. Don't stop reading just yet.

The logic behind SEO is something like this: "My widget company will have more business if I'm in the top slot when someone searches 'widgets' on a search engine. Hmmm... how do I get to that top slot?" The SEO industry tries to put you there.

In the mid- to late 90s, when search engines were few and young, people were already starting to think of ways to be listed more favorably. Today, Internet search is a multi-billion dollar industry. Companies like Google have made fortunes by helping people to find what they're looking for. To understand how SEO works, and why you might want it, you need to have a basic understanding of how search engines work.

Search engines have "crawlers" that sit scanning the web day in and day out. For every page they visit, they collect and store a bunch of information - the title of the page, some of the keywords on the page, how old the page is, how big the page is, and so on. More than that, crawlers also gather information about how many and which pages link to the page, and what pages the current page links to. Yes, it's a HUGE amount of data.

Using all of this information, the search engine then uses a special algorithm to calculate the "importance" or "relevance" of each page for each search keyword.

Basically there are two ways to try to increase your page's relevance:

1. Increase the number and variety of sites that link to your page. Legitimate ways to do this include advertising, promotion, marketing, link exchanging, and adding your site to web directories. Other ways (often penalized by search engines) include spamdexing and webrings. Every try googling "click here"? The first several links are common browser plugins, because SO many sites have a link "click here to download..." QuickTime, Adobe PDF reader, Windows Media Player, etc.
2. Tweak the text, markup, images, and code on your site to try to please search engines. There are lots of possible tweaks - making sure all images have text that describes them, using a block-element design instead of one with tables, and carefully constructing keywords and other metadata on each page.

Some "optimizations" involve loading every page with hundreds of keywords, making titles too long, or adding unnecessary links between pages on your website. Be careful! Modern search engines are smart and can actually penalize these attempts. The best rule of thumb is to write your titles, keywords, and text as you would for a human - a title a sentence or less, no more than 15 keywords, and simple, logical, clear writing (not littered with extraneous keywords beyond what you need to get your point across).

One last word about SEO: it's not for everyone. Some examples:

• Suppose you run a towing service: SEO might be a good idea. Think of all those people, stranded on a highway, googling "local towing service" from their phone...
• If you own a local brewery, you might be better off with an ad campaign than with SEO. Think about it: how many people are going to google "refreshing new beer"? You just need to generate awareness of your product.
• Say you're a dentist. While some people might search "local dentist", most will get a recommendation from friends or family. Maybe you should focus on social marketing.

Social Media

You might have heard this term "social media" thrown around quite a bit. While it is a fairly recent concept, don't think of it as merely a passing trend.

Social media is a term for any social interaction between individuals or communities and content, which occurs through the media (most often, the Internet). Specifically, it's any software or website that:

• can identify specific users and groups of users
• allows users to create or share content that they think is funny, interesting, or important
• allows other users to respond to the content - indicating what they think of it, recommending it to their friends, etc.

Yes, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Plurk, Tumblr, Digg, StumbleUpon, Foursquare, and similar sites are all forms of social media, but it's been around longer than that. Even in the 90s, people formed online communities on forums, blogs, and chatrooms - which still qualify as social media.

But why should your business or organization bother with social media? Because:

• it facilitates faster communication between individuals and organizations, making a company more personal and helpful
• it gives businesses a better idea of what their customers do and don't like
• it provides a means to quickly reach a large customer community with promotions, messages, and news
• it makes it easy for customers to recommend your company to their friends - helping you quickly build a good business reputation

Getting started with social media isn't hard, you can simply sign up for one or more common social media service and start promoting your business there. The next step is to integrate these services into your website.

For more information about what social networks you should join, what content you should be posting, how to use various social media sites, how to link your social media presence to your website, or how to go further, do get in touch with us. We're happy to help.