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Choosing
Web Hosting
And Web Design Services
Excerpted from
Chapter 14
Business Know-How:
An Operational Guide for Home-Based
And Micro-Sized Businesses On Limited Budgets
by Janet Attard
Adams Media
Copyright 2000, Janet Attard
All Rights Reserved.
Know what to
expect
With web hosting and web design, you don't always get what you pay
for. High price is no assurance of good service from your web host. Nor is
it an assurance of good web design focused on your objectives. One organization paid
several thousand dollars to have
their web site designed and hosted for a year. The web site consisted of
only a few pages of text and one graphic image. There were no databases
and no order forms. The only interactive feature was a function to send
mail to the owners of the site. The entire job - including creating the
graphic image - shouldn't have taken more than a day or two to create.
Other small business
owners have paid equally high prices to have their web site designed with
animation and sound, only to discover that the first thing their visitors
to their site look for his the "skip the intro" button.
You could get ripped
off like this too, if you don't know what you are buying. Launching a web
site is a process that involves several types of activities. Depending on
the nature of your site, those services will include some or all of the
following:
-
Setting up the
web site on a hosting service
-
Hosting the web
site on an ongoing basis (storing the web site on a computer,
connecting it to the internet)
-
Registering a
domain name (giving yourself a unique "address" on the web
such as your business.com)
-
Designing web
pages (similar to typesetting and laying out a newsletter)
-
Designing art
work (creating original art work for the web site
-
Writing the
editorial content for the web site
-
Programming a
database to work on the web (for mailing lists, surveys, catalogs,
customer sales data, etc.)
-
Registering the
site with Internet search engines Marketing and promoting the site (on
the web and off line)
-
Advertising (on
the web and off line)
-
Scanning your
graphics and text to make them useable on the web
Maintaining the
site on an ongoing basis
Few companies offer
all of these services. Many, however offer "complete" packages
that include setting up and hosting the site along with design and limited
maintenance. Although using a single source to do all the work sounds
convenient, it isn't necessarily a good idea. The person who is a whiz at
computer programming may have no artistic abilities and no eye for graphic
design. Someone who is capable of putting text into html may not know
anything about creating the editorial content for the site or about
marketing. (Don't assume they can type well or spell words correctly
either!) And, the company that hosts the web site may charge a small
fortune to "design" your website, when all they do is plug your
material into a cookie-cutter template that they use to "design"
every web site they create.
Furthermore, if you
are charged a flat fee, you may wind up paying for services you don't
need, or overpaying for the ones you do need.
To make sure the
price you are quoted is fair, ask the provider to give you an itemized
list of services they provide and to specify the fee they are charging for
each service.
Get quotes from
several vendors and compare them. Look at how much disk space you get, how
much bandwidth you are allowed (how much data can be transferred monthly
for the fee), and what extra charges you'll incur if you go over these
amounts. If you plan to sell online, see if there are extra charges for a
"storefront," too. Ask whether you will have access to update
the files yourself if you decide to, how many email accounts you will be
given, and whether there are extra charges for autoresponders, mailing
lists and other services you may want.
Know the going
rates
Be wary of deals
that offer you a set number of "pages" unless you have no plans
to add anything to your site after it is set up. A page requires very
little space on a computer. If you only need to have a few
"pages" on the internet, you shouldn't have to pay more than $10
or $15 a month for hosting them, plus a reasonable hourly fee for taking
your material and converting it into html web pages.
In 1999, web hosting
prices for people who could build their own web sites ranged from as
little as $15 a month to $50 a month or more depending on the amount of
computer (server) space needed and whether the web site would require
database, audio or video capabilities. A site costing $15 per month in
hosting fees was adequate from most small businesses whose primarily goal
is to put sales literature on the web to get sales leads. Some hosting
companies included shopping cart software (software for setting up a
retail site) at no extra charge with host plans costing about $25 a month.
Graphic artists and programmers typically charge $75 an hour and up.
Conversion of documents to simple HTML pages costs between $15 and $25 an
hour.
Find affordable
web hosting
If you will be
creating your own web pages or if you want to compare the prices your
service provider quotes to price elsewhere, be sure to visit Budgetweb.com
http://www.budgetweb.com/budgetweb/index.html.
This web site contains a directory of companies that offer web hosting
services and a primer that explains some of the terms you may encounter in
setting up your web. There is also a list of questions you should ask a
web hosting company on the site.
Ask for
references and check them
Before you agree to
have anyone design your web site ask for references. Get the names and
URLs of web sites they have designed for other companies. Look at those
sites and see if you like them. Is the design of the pages attractive? Do
they load quickly? Do they all look the same? Look around the sites for
the email address of the owners and send them email. Ask if they were
satisfied with the work that was done for them and if it was done in a
timely fashion.
Excerpted from
Chapter 14 of Business Know-How. May not be reproduced or transmitted
without written permission.
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