Website – A Step by step guide to a get your own
You decided you need a website. What now? This short guide will help you understand what is involved and why each step is needed when starting your own website.
Steps to follow to enable your website
You will need to take the following steps to move from that decision to a presence on the internet that will hopefully improve your business or brand.
A. Registering
Decide on a name. Try to keep it short as it will also most likely become part of your email address. A long address only leads to errors when typing in your email address. The website address does not have to be your full business name.
Surprisingly, your web address has very little to do with being found on the internet. If your company name is “Joe’s Freight Handlers”, jfh.co.ke will work just fine, but 3 letter domain names are more expensive. Keep a few options open such as jfhandlers.co.ke or joefh.co.ke.
Most registration platforms will not only check availability but also offer alternative Top Level Domains (TLD’s) such as jfh.ke or jfh.biz (if available).
Check availability of your chosen domain. This can be done using our domain search.
B. Hosting
Decide on the hosting package you need. Most people overestimate the size that they will need so rather go smaller than bigger as an upgrade is always easier than a downgrade.
If you are planning on running your site with some very special custom scripting and software consider getting your own Virtual Private Server (VPS). Also, remember that if you need C# and/or .NET/.ASP(X) you will need to host on your own Windows VPS as most hosting companies do not offer Windows as a web hosting platform due to security issues.
With us, you can register your domain and get Web Hosting in the same transaction which makes the process a lot simpler. I would always recommend to either take the hosting and domain together or register your hosting package first and then your domain.
C. Email and Content
Add your email addresses to your web portal. This is easy to do through our customer portal if you have a Web Hosting package.
Build your website by either using one of our free Website Builders or your own web designer. Web designers will usually also do the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so that Google and other search engines will become aware of your website. You can do this yourself, but it needs some research to get it right as the rules change every year.
Why do I need “hosting”?
When you register your web domain (website name) it is like registering a business name. Once you have done it, you have a registered website name but it won’t have any content yet.
We keep this content on a computer that runs 24/7/365 on the internet. This is a server. We also give the server a fixed address (IP Address) on the internet so that it can be found.
The server also runs specialized software to serve up the web content requested. This is what hosting is – providing this 24/7/365 service to make your website available on the internet.
What is web content?
This is the information you would like to be seen on the internet. Your site contains information about your business. It may include product descriptions, service offerings, brochures or catalogues and price lists.
Contact details, some company history and some indication of the company setup ie About Us or Who We Are are also good to have.
You supply content, usually in word format. You must then have this content converted into a format suitable for the web. A web-designer can do this or you can use a Content Management Software (CMS) portal.
Our Web Hosting packages all include free CMS software. We make it easy for you to host your website. We also provide a free SSL Certificate for every site on our Web Hosting packages.
Happy Hosting!
