Other pages in this series: 1. Overview | 2. Preparation | 3. Production | Business models
If you already have an account with an ISP (internet service) this may come with the right to some free web space on that ISP's server. For example, if your ISP is www.isp.net, and your email username is baah, your free website will probably be www.isp.net/~baah. While this can be OK for a personal site, it's not good for a permanent business site, because ISPs have a habit of going out of business, changing their name, or merging with others, When that happens, you lose your web address - sometimes overnight. After that happened to us twice in two years, we finally bought the domain name www.audiencedialogue.org. So now, even if we change the hosting company, we can take our domain name with us. Domain names are cheap - as little as 10 US dollars a year - so it's definitely worthwhile to have your own.
Choosing a name can be difficult. Short names are more easily remembered, and harder to mistype, but most of the meaningful short names are already taken. I suggest choosing a memorable name that's unique in the area where your organization operates.
if you are working on a worldwide basis, it's best to buy a domain name that's not country-specific, ending in .com or .net or .org. But if you operate in only a single country, it's advisable to use a domain name from that country, such as .com.au for an Australian commercial site. The best name is one that your potential users will expect. For your site to be found, it's important to be in line with the industry you're working in. For example, because most of Audience Dialogue's clients are international non-government organizations, .org is best for us.
Also worth knowing: you can buy several domain names, and link them all to your site - such as alternate versions of your organization's name. For example,we could buy audience-dialogue.org, audiencedialog.org, audiencedialogue.com - and so on. Whichever version the user typed in, they'd end up at our main site. Note that a domain name can contain only letters, numbers, and hyphens. Domain names are bought from domain name registrars, with usually one or several in each country.
Your existing ISP may charge you a lot extra to host a domain name, so you may need to find another host. That's no problem: keep the local ISP (and your email address), and upload your site through that ISP to the new host - which can be anywhere in the world. For example, we're based in Australia, but one of our sites is kept on a server in the US, using the excellent and low-cost hosting service at www.your-site.com. Distance is not a problem, and there's no international access cost.
When you have chosen a host, the final stage before publication is to upload all the pages to the host's server. When your site has been uploaded, the world can see it.
To upload a site to the server generally requires using FTP (file transfer) software, such as WS-FTP or Cute FTP (for Windows), or Fetch (for Mac). FTP software enables you to send the completed HTML files making up the website from your own computer to the host's server. When you change a page, just upload it again by FTP, and the previous version will be replaced. In other words, there are two copies of the website: one on the local computer being used to develop the site, and the other on the host. You need to make sure that these are synchronized, but the standard software can do that for you.
It's not much use having a website if nobody knows it's there. So you're not finished yet. The next step is to publicize the site. This is done in four main ways: one offline way, and three online ways: search engines, links, and advertising on the Web.
Offline: in other words, not using the Internet. Instead, you use advertising, word of mouth, and traditional media to spread the word about your website. Though email is online, it can be used for publicity, as long as you avoid the slightest hint of spamming.
Search engines: More and more people are using search engines to find websites. They type in a search phrase, and the search engine may throw up thousands of web pages containing that phrase. The challenge is to be near the top of that list, because most users won't bother to look past the first 10 or 20 listings. This is where search engine optimization comes in handy. You can pay a lot for such services - but you don't need to, unless you have a lot of direct competitors. Just makes sure that the titles and the headings of the pages on your website correspond to what your potential visitors will be looking for. This may involve some audience research (Audience Dialogue can help with that).
Links: because the Web is a network of links, the more links there are to your pages, the more easily people will be able to find your site. So think of the sites that visitors to your site might visit first - e.g. by typing suitable phrases into a search engine. Then contact those sites, invite them to link to your site. This is normally done by exchanging links - "I'll link to your site, if you link to mine."
Advertising online: A quick, but expensive way of letting the world know of your site is to buy advertising on the web. One of the most effective methods is to buy advertising on search engines, specifying the search phrases that will bring up your ad. If you are selling (for example) white goddesses, you can "buy" the term "white goddess". Every time somebody searches for that, an ad will appear for your site. This targeted advertising can be very good value - much better value for money than traditional media, because you don't waste money reaching people who aren't interested. Another method of online advertising (not nearly so effective) is to buy "banner ads" on popular websites. If people visiting those sites are attracted by your banner ad, they can click on it to be taken to your site. However, the average "click-through" rate is well under 1% - and falling.
Gaining publicity is a slow process on the web, unless you spend huge amounts of money on advertising. Most search engines do a "crawl" of the web, checking for new sites about once a month. You can also get listed with directories, such as Yahoo and the Open Directory, but that costs money and/or takes several months. Because some search engines rank the pages they find based on the number of links to those pages, getting links is a high priority - but exchanging links takes time. Therefore, unless you initially splurge on advertising, the number of visitors to your new site will take months (or years) to build up. So an appropriate response for you is to focus on the quality of visitors, not the quantity - and to make your site striking enough that visitors will mention it to others.
A problem with a lot of websites is that they are way out of date - and it shows. How much credibility can a website have if it's clearly several years out of date? How can visitors to the site be sure the organization still exists? So it's important both to keep a site up to date, and to show that it's up to date. We do this by showing a revision date at the foot of each page - not today's date, automatically generated (which fools very few people) but the actual date when the content was revised.
Many small websites rely on web development consultants to keep the sites up to date. Though this is easy for the site's owner (print out the page to be changed, write in the changes by hand, and fax it to your developer) the expense and slowness of this process works against keeping a site up to date - particularly when it comes to removing material that's out of date. There can be confusion, too. Did you wonder why I said 'fax it" rather than email it? That method ensures the changes go on the right page, at the right points.
In the end, there's no substitute for learning to manage a site yourself - even if you retain a developer for help with the more complex changes. There are many simple, low-cost content management systems that make changing a web page almost as easy as using word processing software.
Another aspect of keeping a site up to date is regularly checking the links to other sites. One easy way to tell that a site isn't up to date is when you follow the links from the site, only to discover that most of them are no longer valid. Links are constantly changing addresses and going out of existence. We check this site's external links once a month, and about 10% of the links are no longer valid between one month and the next. So even if you don't change your own site, it still needs to be updated regularly.
Apart from updating to keep a site working, there's also the matter of updating the site to encourage visitors to return. If the site doesn't change from one year to the next, why should any visitor come back to it? Many sites (including this one) have a News section on their home page, to immediately show visitors what's new.
There must be thousands of web pages on how to plan, design, and set up websites. Having looked at a lot of these, we found that most of them don't add much to what's written above. Here are the most useful...
Audience Dialogue has other pages on web development which might be worth reading if you're planning a new website. These include