There are a number of factors to consider.

Disk Space
This is the actual physical space on the server for your files. If you’re just using text, screen resolution photos and a few icons and graphics then you really won’t need much space at all. A few megabytes will do. If you’re going to be working with high resolution photos, audio or video files then you might need more.

Data Transfer
This is the amount of data that is downloaded each month. It’s a combination of the sizes of files on the site and the number of visitors. If your site is well optimised and you’ve kept your files as small as can be then, again, you probably won’t need much data transfer. With a new site things are usually slow to start of with but then snowball as the site grows. YOu need to keep an eye on the monthly data transfer (your web host should give you this) and upgrade to a higher transfer limit only when you need to.

Reliability
Many web hosts talk about their “uptime” – the proportion of time that your site will be up. It’s usually 99.9% or higher. With greater reliability comes a higher price tag. YOu have to ask yourself if your site going offline for a short time is really such a bad thing and what it would cost you. Obviously, if you’re a massive site like Amazon then being offline for even a minute could cost you thousands but, in reality, for many new sites it’s probably better to risk a few minor outages and save money on the hosting.

Support
Finally, it’s worth weighing up what kind of support you will receive. If you’re new to working with web hosting, managing email accounts or have specialist requirements, e.g. working with ASP.NET, then knowing that there’s someone there to help you can be valuable.

With a new website my advice would be to start small and let the hosting grow with the site. As the numbers of visitors increases you can naturally afford to invest more in your hosting. Only pay for what you need. Start with a small hosting package on a shared server and upgrade as you need to.

Firstly, you need to find the free domain names available on the web. For this, you can take help of your web host. Some web hosting plans include a free domain name with their hosting plan.

So, once you know where to actually register a name, how do you pick the right one?

To help demonstrate some different selection methods I’ll use the ficticious example of P J Morris, a long established bookshop based in Ashford, Kent.*

In an ideal world where all possible domain names are available here are a few different ways of approaching it.

Firstly, you can just use the business name. Examples:

pjmorris.co.uk
p-j-morris.co.uk

This works well if your brand is already known to your audience. People in the town who already know the shop would recognise it online and easily remember the domain name.

If you’re looking to build a brand or attract visitors who are not familiar with your business, the domain would need to be very simple and memorable.

Some websites use abstract names, which don’t actually describe what the site has to offer, but they are very easy to remember, easy to spell and very brandable. Some examples of this might be Bing.com and Amazon.com.

Another approach might be to use the business’s activity as the main focus. Examples:

books.co.uk
bookshop.co.uk

(remember we’re assuming that everything’s available)

These two approaches can, of course, be combined to give the business’s name and its activity. Examples:

pjmorrisbooks.co.uk
pjmorris-bookshop.co.uk

Finally, you can use the business location in the domain name, either with the business name, the business activity or both. Examples:

pjmorrisashford.co.uk
pjmorriskent.co.uk
books-ashford.co.uk
kentbooks.co.uk
pjmorrisbooksashford.co.uk
pjmorris-books-ashford.co.uk

Using the business location may help match local searches but may also limit your business’s scope to local searchers.

In the real world, a new site for a book shop would have an enormous amount of competition so combining the name or activity with a geographical reference to successfully match more specific searches is probably a good strategy.

Some general tips:

• It’s better to avoid using hyphens (-) if possible as people don’t remember them.

• Try to keep domain names short. pjmorris.co.uk is easy to remember, talk about, give out over the phone and easy to include in any offline marketing, whereas, the other extreme, pjmorris-books-ashford.co.uk, becomes a bit of a mouthful and hard to use.

* Any resemblance to any real person or business of this name is purely coincidental.

Static website

Pros

• As it’s simpler it’s quicker. I can produce a static site in a matter of days at a push.
• When it comes to design, there are no restrictions.
• It’s cheaper. Cheaper to initially build and cheaper to run.

Cons

• If you want to update it you have to contact the web developer and wait for him/her to update the content for you.
• If you want to use an XML sitemap you have to have it updated manually each time you change your content.

Content Management System

Pros

• You can update the site’s content whenever you want, from wherever you want, provided you’ve got an internet connection.
• It’s even possible to update your website by email.
• As the site structure is dynamic all navigatoin is handled for you. For example, if you add a new page it automatically appears on the menus.
• Your XML sitemap is automatically updated every time you change the site’s content, meaning the search engines can keep up you.

Cons

• It’s more expensive. The set up takes longer and the web hosting costs more.
• The web designer doesn’t have quite as much creative freedom as he’she has to fit in with the CMS framework.

Conclusion

In the end it boils down to how much content you are dealing with and how frequently that content is going to change.

If you are starting up a new business it may be worth taking advantage of the tax breaks allowed as start-up costs and go for the CMS.

The easiest way to design for people is to give them more of what they already know and understand. Let’s take a look at the most popular sites in the UK and see how they do things. We’ll look at where various page elements are positioned and how links are styled. This list comes from Alexa’s Top Sites in the United Kingdom.

Google (UK/Global)
google.co.uk/google.com

logo position – centered, top
login position – top right
search box position – central
settings position – top right
filters/options position – top
ads/sponsored results position – right column
corporate info position – footer
links – blue, underlined
unlinked URLs – green

Facebook
facebook.com

logo position – top left
login/logout position – top right
search position – top right
options position – top
feed filters position – left column
ads position – right column
corporate info position – footer
post box position – central, top
links – dark blue, not underlined

YouTube
youtube.com

logo position – top left
login position – top right
search box position – top, central and repeated at foot of page
corporate info position – footer
links – blue, not underlined

Yahoo!
yahoo.com

logo position – top left
login position – top right
search box position – top, central
filters position – top
options/filters/personalised links position – left column
corporate info position – footer
links – dark blue, not underlined
links – black, not underlined (in menu box)

Bing
bing.com

logo position – top left
login position – top right
search box position – central, top
corporate info position – footer
links – white, not underlined (to fit with background image)
links – blue, underlined
links – blue, not underlined (in menu box)
unlinked URLs – green

BBC
bbc.co.uk

accessibility info position – top left
logo position – top left
search box position – top, central
corporate info position – footer
links – green, not underlined

eBay UK
ebay.co.uk

logo position – top left
login position – top
search box position – top
filters position – left column
corporate info position – footer
links – blue, not underlined

The consensus

From looking at these popular sites we can see these common conventions:

logo position – usually top left corner
login position – usually top right corner
search box position – always at the top, usually central
corporate info position – always found in the page’s footer
search filters or options position – either running horizontally across the top or down the left side
ads position – in the right column, after the main content
links – usually blue or dark blue, sometimes underlined, more commonly not but underlined on hover

Consciously or not, this is what people are used to seeing on the web so this is what you should follow. Web users will instinctively look for these page elements in these locations and understand links in these colour schemes. Any deviation from “the norm” will increase the chances of uncertainty or confusion.

Email Spam

There are a lot of anti-spam or spam filter products around these days, many included in mail software but the sad fact is that once you’re getting spam you’re likely to keep getting spam regardless of these filters.

Spammers are able to change the sender’s email address, subject and body of an email so easily that if you block them they can still mail you just using a different mail account.

Anti-spam software like anti-virus software can only deal with what it knows to be harmful or unwanted. Anything new or unknown will slip through the net.

The way to avoid spam is never to let your email address get into the wrong hands. Once a spammer has got your email address they can not only use it to send you junk email but also sell it on to other spammers. Once you’re address is out there you’ve no hope of keeping the spam at bay.

If we understand how the spammers get our email addresses we can avoid them.

Unscrupulous Websites

This is an obvious one but when giving your email address as part of registration on a website be careful to check the terms and conditions or privacy policy as you may be agreeing to have your details passed to a third party. You just have to judge carefully how trustworthy you think the site is.

Unwanted Newsletters

At times it can be risky signing up to newsletters by email. Even though they offer you the option to unsubscribe at ay time they may also subscribe you to other similar newsletters without your express permission. You might sign up to receive newsletters from one site and start receiving them from another related site. Often where companies own several websites with subscription services they can try to cross-promote. Check the terms and conditions or privacy policy carefully.

Harvesting Web Pages

This is a common process used to gather email addresses. Robots trawl through websites looking for email addresses and feeding them back to the spammer. In short, never give an email address on a web page. Instead use a contact form which delivers the message to your inbox without ever revealing the address.

Guessing Common Recipient Names

Many spammers will not even try to find email addresses but will just try their luck at guessing them. If they know the domain name and send emails to info@ or sales@ there’s a good chance some of them will get through. If you try to use email addresses that are less obvious you shouldn’t get as much spam.

Email Scams

At one time or another you’ve probably had an email from a friend or colleague with some “too good to be true” offer or superstitious nonsense. These scams are easy to spot as they usually ask you to forward the message to a certain number of people and CC a particular email address.

The offers are never real. What is actually happeneing is the spammers are relying on people’s naivety to spread the email. Each time the email is forwarded to 10 people the spammer will get an email back (the CC address) and have 10 new email addresses to add to his/her spam database.

The difficulty with this is that to a certain degree it’s beyond your control. You just need to make sure that you’re never taken in by these scams and do your best to make your friends and colleagues aware of this scamming technique so that you don’t appear on their forwarding list.

Forms and Blogs

Contact forms, blogs and other Web 2.0 applications invite visitors to a webpage to leave comments or provide feedback. Spammers see this a an opportunity to leave spam messages usually containing links to their websites.

Comments can often be set so that they have to be moderated and manually approved by the owner before being published but even then huge amounts of spam can become a problem with moderation becoming unmanageable.

There are two answers to this – use clever scripting to fool spam robots or use a CAPTCHA control in your page.

Spam robots visit pages and look for opportunities to enter content. They cannot do things that a human user can do such as answer questions or interpret images. By forcing the page visitor to act like a human in order to leave a message we can reduce spam to only that manually left by real people.

Spam robots can easily be fooled by using fake fields in a form. Include a field for some bit of information you don’t actually need and hide it using CSS. Only allow the message to be left if the field is blank. The spam robot will complete it.

You’ve probably come across CAPTCHA controls but may not know them by this name. You’re shown a fuzzy image containing a word or letters and numbers and then asked to type the characters into a text field. Spam robots can’t do this.

If you’re having problems with spam coming from your website ask your web developer to use some of these measures and you should see a difference within a short time.

6 Quick Tips

1. Never open spam emails – if in doubt, delete it
2. Never reply to spam emails – you’re just confirming delivery
3. Never forward suspicious emails – don’t spread the problem
4. Check terms or privacy policy when giving your email address
5. Never publish an email address on a web page
6. Use scripting or a CAPTCHA control on web forms – don’t allow spam robots to post

Twitter is basically about posting short messages, much like SMS texting on mobiles. Each post is called a “tweet” and is limited to 140 characters. It can’t include other media as such but it can include hyperlinks so anything you wish to share is only a click away.

It doesn’t work like email where you choose the recipients of your messages but more like a subscription service. You put your message out there and it’s read by your subscribers. In many ways it’s more like broadcasting.

As a Twitter user, or “Twitterer”, you have the option to “follow” other users meaning you subscribe to their broadcasts. Each user has lists of “following” – who he/she has chosen to follow and “followers” – who is following him/her.

Twitter has 2 real strengths which differentiate it from other networks.

Firstly, the 140 characters limit means it is highly portable and works well with mobile phone applications. For example, it’s very easy to let your followers know what you’re doing whilst on the move.

Secondly, when you read someone else’s “tweet” there’s a facility to “retweet” it, which means instantly broadcasting it to all of your followers. This means that something written by one person can reach millions within a very short time frame. This is what tends to happen with big breaking news stories and this is why it is becoming such a powerful tool for marketing and PR.

If anyone wants to follow me and be alerted to new articles I’m @chris22smith.

My traffic building strategy was to target a few carefully chosen high quality links. My plan was to try to create a small number of links to my site, quality not quatity, coming from web pages highly ranked by Google and with a subject matching the page on my site. I also decided to use deep linking rather than just point everything at my home page.

The subject of my blog is web development resources and, in particular, ASP.NET web development. (Two links in that last sentence, sorry, can’t help myself.)

When I blogged about a particular solution I then went in search (Google) of people with technical issues looking for my solution. All I then did was create a forum account and post a reply linking out to my blog post. Highly relevant. I’d respond to forum posts that had been dead for 2 years. Doesn’t matter. I’m still getting a link to my site which is good for me and the solution is posted on that forum for anyone who searches in the future.

The key point is that in this scenario is that the inbound links I have created are actually useful to the linking site’s audience. Everybody wins. It’s in no way trying to cheat the system. This is the right way to generate your inbound links.

My first port of call is always Google. The way I see it is that I’m unikely to ever have a technical requirement that somebody else hasn’t had before. In fact, it’s highly likely that hundreds, even thousands of people have faced the same challenges. By using the right search terms on Google I can usually find the answers to my problems. This inspired me to build a technical blog. It’s my way of sharing what I’ve learnt and, hopefully, helping someone else out.

As well as trying to help others it’s also tremendously useful to me. Every time I overcome an obstacle I write about it and provide the solution giving code examples where I can. It’s very handy to just be able to just come back to it rather than try to remember things that I’ve done in the past. I also use the site for setting up links to resources I like and use. Again, it just saves me time looking for things.

My site is called Dinowebs, http://dinowebs.net. The site covers all sorts of coding and web development subject matter. Please take a look.

I registered the domain name and started building the site on 15th June 2004. This has made me all nostalgic so I thought I’d take a quick look back over the last 5 years and how the site and business has changed in that time.

I registered the domain with a company called 123-reg whom I still use to this day. They provide good value domain registration with a nice simple control panel. I also hosted my first site with them though now I have moved on, mainly due to the more advanced technologies I now use.

2004

My first design was fairly basic but, looking back on it now, I still like its simplicity and clarity.

Although it was a new site it managed to bring in some good enquiries and before long I was off and running.

I can still remember my first enquiry and the first website I built for a client very clearly.

2006

As the “cheap web design” market got more and more competitive I needed to redesign the site to try to improve its search engine rankings. I tried using an individual web page for each individual service I could offer.

With hindsight, I think what I gained in web traffic I lost in conversions as this design failed to impress web development seekers.

2007

Another year on the web was changing and Web 2.0 technologies were becoming more common. I decided I needed a different design with a fresher, more vibrant feel. This design change saw a marked improvement in my enquiry levels.

I also started using server side technology to create more interactivity.

Today

My site now uses a blogging model and has articles as its centre rather than just the static pages about my services. This model is strong on the search engine side and my visitor numbers are higher than ever. It also means I get to write about the things that I’m passionate about – web development and online marketing.

The Future

I’m just in the process of launching a new site focused on Online Marketing. Please take a look at Chris Smith Marketing, www.chrissmithmarketing.com.

Using Google Analytics or a similar web stats package you can see how many people are visiting a particular page or downloading a particular document on your website.

When you’re creating a new online marketing campaign it’s useful for you to be clear on what web traffic has been generated from a specific activity rather than just look at your overall traffic.

For example, if you were promoting a particular event you might place a link on your website’s home page, run an ad on Facebook and do an email to your contacts. It would be very useful to know the effectiveness of each of these activities.

The easiest way to monitor this is to use specific URLs, one for each activity or source.

Instead of adding a normal link to your page, e.g. http://www.yourwebsite.com/event.htm, you can create unique URLs by adding additional information on to the end of the URL. These additional bits of information are called parameters and values. Here are some examples:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/event.htm?src=homepage

http://www.yourwebsite.com/event.htm?src=facebook

http://www.yourwebsite.com/event.htm?src=email

To introduce additional information you add a question mark “?” to the end and then a parameter name. This can be anything you like. Here I’ve used “src” short for source. You then have an equals sign “=” and set a value against it. Again, this can be anything you like.

If you’re website is database driven your URLs may already have one or more sets of parameters and values in the URL (look for a question mark). If this is the case you simply need to add an ampersand “&” on to the end plus your parameter name, an equals sign “=” and a value. The ampersand is used to join pairs of parameters and values.

By adding further sets of parameters and values to the URL you can get more detailed information back. For example, if your contacts database identified people’s sex and you wanted to check whether more men or women were visiting your page you could use the URLs:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/event.htm?src=email&sex=male

http://www.yourwebsite.com/event.htm?src=email&sex=female

You can use this URL monitoring to see which activities are working for you and which are providing the best value for money and return on investment.