Designs and hosting services

If you know all that and want a domain name fast and easy, simply click here.

Designs.

The design of a website is crucial to influence the following factors ;

• a user can visit it without getting lost in reams of pages
• it opens quickly on the screen
• pages print properly
• it has content in the overall design which is what the user is looking for
• it has a pleasing appeal to the eye

Of course, most of that is subjective, not necessarily a scientific. There is a balance to be reached between the technical isues that allow a web page to be displayed and the artwork that also is required.

A major factor is speed - any page which downloads slower than 15 seconds on broadband connections will probably result in the viewer clicking off to another site.

Content is another - carefully crafted wording and layouts of pages not only help visitors find what they are looking for, they also provide the basis of search engine ranking success.

Hosting.

After the design is done, you need a place to keep all that excellent material you just spent hundreds of hours accumulating and moulding into a web site.

This part of our service is free for a year if we do the initial design. We are not one of the very large ISP or hosting providers, but we do maintain our own servers in London and all of our design client materials are hosted here. Speed of access is amongst the fastest in the developed world, there is 24 hour power back up and redundancy on name servers so if one drops out, your site can be found. So called "up time" is in excess of 99 %.

WHY WAIT ? :: Contact us :: See our competitive price structure

Importance of having your own domain name

A question that I frequently hear is "Do I really need to have my own domain name?" The one word answer is "YES". If you put up your site with some of the free web hosting services, the only company who benefits is the web hosting company. The last person who benefits is you. There are a number of reasons why having your own domain name is a must:

1) When you have your own domain name, the address of your web site will be of the form http://www.yoursite.com. On the other hand, if you put up your site on one of the free servers, the address of your web site will be something like http://www.somefreewebsite.com/yoursite/. Which of these two sounds more professional? Which of these two is smaller and is hence easier to remember? I leave you to make the judgement.

2) The only way to make money online is to build up credibility among your customers. Having your own domain name is the first step in doing that. Your customers will feel more comfortable buying whatever it is that you are selling if you have your own domain name. It makes your customers feel that they are dealing with a large, established company, rather than with some fly by night operator.

3) When you have your domain name, you can have multiple email aliases of the form alias@yoursite.com. This allows you to assign different email aliases to different functions, all of them pointing to your actual email address.

4) Many search engines give a lot of emphasis to the home page of a particular domain, i.e. other things remaining the same, a home page of a domain will often rank higher for a particular keyword than any other page. When you use some of the free hosting services, your index.html page is the home page of your site, but not of that domain.

This article is by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected and recognized search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. For more articles on search engine placement, subscribe to his 1st Search Ranking Newsletter by sending a blank email to mailto:1stSearchRanking.999.99@optinpro.com or by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com