Posts Tagged ‘domain name’

29
Sep
2009

Buying Domain Names for your Audience

3 Comments

For those of you who are in the United States, the .com, .net and .org domain are pretty well standard but of course there’s also .us and a whole host of other domains extensions on the market these days but have you ever wondered about using a domain name for your specific market?

Take me for example, while I work throughout the US on websites I actually live in Canada so a lot of companies who market specifically to Canadians use the .ca extension instead. In German, the .de and in the UK it’s a .co.uk.

This is a powerful yet often overlooked marketing tool for companies who sell product or services into a variety of markets, by using a domain name specific to the county, you’re not only pre-qualifying leads to that web property but you’re also customizing content for the specific customer.

Take for example a website which sells cooking DVD’s which wants to sell into multiple markets. Yes, it’s possible to sell into multiple markets based on a single domain name but why not also run the .ca version and adjust pricing throughout the website to reflect the shipping costs in local currency? This allows you to make special offers to each market as well as test new products you’d previously not considered.

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Posted in Marketing Advice

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11
May
2009

How do I remove specific ads from my AdSense ads?

4 Comments

competitive 300x210 How do I remove specific ads from my AdSense ads? imageIf you’re anything like me, running ads on your website isn’t just an option it’s a great way to make money but sometimes there are ads that I simply don’t want on my website so I need to tell Google to block them but how? Actually it’s really very simple, it’s called the Competitive Ad Filter from Google and it’s part of the AdSense tool.

To block an advertisement, you simply need to place the destination URL (where the ad is linked to) into the Competitive Ad Filter dialog box and within a few hours, Google AdSense will stop serving ads to that domain. Pretty easy right? Well there is one problem … how do you know where the ad is linking to?

Finding the desination URL of an AdSense Ad

First off, do not click your own ads. 

Wait … let me repeat that again … do not click the ads. If you click ads on your own website, you’ll earn money from the program and violate your Terms of Service. Google will figure it out (they’re pretty clever) so just don’t do it.

Instead, you’re going to have to do a little bit of detective work but it’s super easy.

  1. View the source code of your webpage. To do this, right click or look under the View or Edit menus for an option
  2. Search for the phrase googlesyndication.com/pagead/adclick which is how every Google ad looks.
  3. After you’ve found the correct ad, look in the code and you’ll see a value titled &adurl= along with a domain name address. For example &adurl=http://www.thisismyurl.com so the domain name that you’d like to stop serving ads for is www.thisismyurl.com.

Now that you know the domain you’d like to cancel ads for, simply visit the Competitive Ad Filter  and add the link.

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Posted in Questions and Answers

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27
Apr
2009

How much does a new web site cost?

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Websites are one of the funniest things to quote, literally a website range from absolutely nothing (Build a Website) or just $100 (Can you put up a website for less than $100?) to thousands, tens of thousands or even millions or dollars to build so how do I effectively answer a question like How much does a new web site cost?

Let’s look at a couple of different methods for estimating what you should spend on the web.

Do it yourself.

Technically, everything you need to build an effective website is already on your computer or can be downloaded from the Internet for free. As long as you have access to a few basic things, you’re set and the cost of building a website is nothing. Here’s what you’ll need:

  1. A text editor such as Notepad or Textedit
  2. An FTP client to connect to your hosting provider
  3. A hosting account on a web hosting provider
  4. A domain name
  5. Basic HTML skills and/or a copy of WordPress
  6. Knowledge of PHP or similar programming language

Hiring a Professional

If you don’t know how to do it yourself or prefer to hire a professional, the cost to build a website is pretty difficult to estimate because it involves two factors;

  1. How complicated is your website
  2. How expensive is your web professional

When you’re estimating how much time your website will take, I think it’s important to get three quotes from three qualified web professionals. As tempting as it is to work with just one, when it comes to the future of your business it’s a great idea to get a few different opinions but as for the quote itself? Expect it to range dramatically.

Sample Pricing

While I can’t speak for other designers / developers I can tell you that I know many web professionals who price themselves in one of three price ranges:

  • Entry Level – $20 – $35 / hr
  • Mid Career – $40 – $60 / hr
  • Senior Level – $75 – $100 / hr
  • Webmasters – $150 (+) /hr

One of the problems answering the question however is that the amount of time that it takes for somebody to do a job varies, even within the same career levels. For example, my time to SEO a website is fairly low because it’s what I specialize in but my great friend Chris Bavota does it just as fast even though he considers himself less experienced. On the other hand, my custom programming is faster in both prototyping and execution … his rich media on the other hand? Faster and cleaner than I could ever dream. This is why the same project, quoted from three designers / developers can be dramatically different.

A basic website – If your looking for a small website, using WordPress as a content manager, minor customizations to a theme, advice to select some great plugins and installation on a new domain name you should expect to pay for anywhere from three to ten hours of time plus consulting of course.

A large business website – Larger websites are significant investments for a company, while they’re equally difficult to judge one measure that I’ve found fairly accurate in the past is to look at the companies annual print advertising budget and assume the development of a website to compete will cost 75% of the existing budget for the first year and 50% for each additional year. 

For example, if your yellow page ad budget is $150 per month ($1,800/yr), you should anticipate your website costing ~$1,350 once completed. This of course represents between 10 and 60 hours of time for a web professional, depending on their experience and level.

A website just like X -  Just to put it out there (because I’m asked the about twice a month), building a website like another popular site is possible, so here are some quick estimates:

  • Facebook – 4,000 hours development & 300 hours per month marketing / maintenance
  • MySpace – ditto.
  • Elance – 2,500 hours development & 200 hours per month maintenance
  • eBay – 2,000 hours development & 200 hours per month maintenance
  • Plenty of Fish – 2,000 hours development & 200 hours per month maintenance

What should you ask your web design firm?

There are a couple of things that I would always recommend you ask your web design firm before getting started with them.

  • Talk to some previous clients to see how responsive and supportive the firm was
  • Ask a few previous clients what the cost / timeline overruns turned out to be
  • Did they find working with the team pleasant?

Web designers are notoriously grumpy sometimes, so you should be able to forgive a little bit of that (it’s a stressful job, like working in a kitchen) but what matters (also like working in a kitchen) is how well the final piece turned out and if it got out on time.

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Posted in Questions and Answers

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27
Apr
2009

How do you move a website to a new domain?

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“… changing your IP address, webhost, domain name, blog template, and blog version all at the same time is the exact opposite of what you should normally do. It’s better to change only one thing at a time so that if something goes horribly wrong, you can trace what caused it.”

 - Matt Cutts (http://www.dullest.com/blog/switching-things-around/)

Why move a website?

First and foremost, why would you move a website? Well there’s a few reasons that I can think of right off the top of my head:

  • Your old domain name was inappropriate
  • You lost your old domain
  • You decided to change focus
  • You started on a sub domain and related to a full

What ever the reason, sometimes we have to move domains so the real question is … how do you do it right?

How to move a domain properly

Moving WordPress

First, lets assume that you’re using WordPress.

  1. Log into your phpMyAdmin or control panel and export the WordPress database to an SQL file.
  2. Save the SQL to your hard drive and open it in a text editor
  3. Search for the path of your old domain (i.e. thisismyurl.com) and replace it with your new domain (i.e. getawaygraphics.com) If you’re changing the path, (/blog/) to the root or something as well please make sure to search for the whole string!
  4. Search again! 
  5. Change your server paths. This is a UNIX friendly path that the server uses to identify where you are on that hard drive. For example it may look like /var/www/t/thisismy/public_html/. If you don’t know your server path use my phpinfo() plugin for WordPress to find it.

Installing WordPress on a new domain

Now that you’ve altered your SQL for your old WordPress website,

  1. Install a copy of WordPress on your new domain
  2. Open your phpMyAdmin or control panel and paste the edited SQL into your SQL query box
  3. Wait …
  4. Open your new website in a separate web browser. Assuming everything worked, you should be up and running.

One final note, I always like to re-save my permalink options at this point to ensure the server writes a proper .htaccess file as sometimes it seems to act up.

Search Engine Optimization for the new domain

Next, you’ll want to make sure that the search engines know that you’re new domain is the correct domain and that your old domain is no longer active. You can do this using what is called a 302 redirect. Pretty fancy right? Not really, we’re geeks but … it’s important and that’s where Matt’s post Switching things around comes in handy.

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Posted in Questions and Answers

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25
Feb
2009

Build a Website

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So you want to build a website but you don’t know where to start? Surprisingly building a website is a fairly straight forward process and while you’re going to need to know a few things to get started, creating the actual website is a piece of cake.

The Domain Name

Control Panel
Creative Commons License photo credit: Tim Dorr

Your domain name is your branding on the web. Domain names are an important part of your online identity and should be choosen carefully. Apple Computers for example uses the domain name apple.com while Microsoft uses microsoft.com, a domain name should be easy to remember for your clients, ideally end with .com (you can also own .net, .org etc) and be related to your business.

Hosting

Once you have a domain name, building a website is easy except just like running a restaurant you’ll need to put it somewhere. Small businesses don’t really need to be all that concerned with hosting, a simple web hosting package will meet the needs of most businesses, which is why I recommend BlueHost. Web hosting is like renting space on the internet, it’s about making sure your website is always online.

Build a Website

Now that you have a domain name and hosting, you need to look at building a website for yourself. Throughout my website you fill find everything you need to build a website so I don’t want to repeat myself too much but needless to say, the most important part of building a small business website is content. That’s why when I build websites for customers I stress that before we push a single pixel around the screen, we have:

  1. An approved Sitemap (a list of all the pages on the website)
  2. A summary of the text, photos and graphics for each page

lame story web Build a Website imageSounds funny but in grade school these days, kids are trained how to build websites better than most professional web designers. Before kids can write a story, they first have to create a Story Web. This is a basic structure of a story which shows the key elements of a story. To the right, I’ve created what might be the lamest story web in history … but it’s still better than what a lot of business owners created for their website.

So, here’s the secret to building a website:

  1. Write down ten objectives, if you can’t think of ten … try harder
  2. Throw out five objectives, ten is too many
  3. Pick your main objective … that’s your homepage
  4. For each objective, add three points that makes your website special
  5. Turn each point into a paragraph

Congratulations, you’ve just built a Story Web (or sitemap) for your website. 

Now, give me a call if you’d like me to build a website for you, or take a look at these great articles to build one yourself:

  1. How to make a website for free
  2. Does your website help, or hurt your business?
  3. Get a Free Web Site

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Posted in Web Site Advice

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13
Feb
2009

Free Blogs vs. Hosted Websites

7 Comments

 

free
Creative Commons License photo credit: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³

There are a lot of companies out there which offer free blog websites including sites such as Blogger and WordPress but there’s also the option of going with a web hosting company so what’s the best choice for your company?

 

Free Blogging

Free blogging websites have one key advantage, they’re free. Other than that, they’re very easy to get started with and take very little time to setup. In fact, with something like WordPress you can have your website up and running within a couple of minutes but there’s a catch, the website never really belongs to you.

One of the biggest negative factors to putting your website on a service like WordPress or Blogger is that they own your website’s address and maintain the right to alter content as it suits their needs. What that translates to is pretty simply, if the owners of the services don’t like what you’ve written or believe it violates somebody else’s copyright they have the right to remove it without consulting you, just like Google’s been doing to music websites.

On the other hand, setting up your account with either service is quick and easy, it’s also free.  Free website hosting therefore is suitable for personal blog websites or commentary websites which do not feature business critical content.

Hosted Websites

I don’t think it’s a secret that I choose BlueHost as my hosting provider but there are a lot of great, easy to use web hosting companies out there and running WordPress on any of them is just as easy as running it on the commercial, hosted version found at WordPress.com.

The primary drawback of a hosted solution is cost. Registering your domain name will cost about $10 per year and your website hosting will set you back around $75.  There’s an old article of mine which talks about hosting a website for less than $100 which I highly recommend for new website owners as well as a special promotion that I’m currently running which will give you $75 in advertising credits and a free website for signing up with BlueHost.

The key advantage of hosting your own website is control. Once you host your own site, you can assign a domain name and maintain the content using exactly the same software as the free solutions but without having to worry about other people editing your content. Self hosted solutions will also allow you to edit the themes, add new plugins and build on your website using better search engine optimization and organic marketing.

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Posted in WordPress Help

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06
Feb
2009

So you lost your job, now it’s time to live.

33 Comments

OK, so you’ve taken the time to read my article about how to avoid Common Mistakes Web Marketers Make, you know the Top 10 Web Site Mistakes That Businesses Make and you’ve read How even a College Student can Make Money on the Internet but now that it comes down to it … you’re totally stuck and have no idea what to write about. Never fear, I’m here to help you with that as well.

Recently Under Employed?

Wow, I gotta tell you recessions are awesome. I know most people hate them but I’m 34 years old and in the tech industry. For me, I started my career in the recession of the early 1990’s and watched the Southern Ontario steel industry implode. Then … I went into computers and watched the millennium bug evaporate along with all the jobs, followed by the great IT bubble burst of the early 2000’s and the Nortel collapse that followed. My entire professional career has been in a recession so guess what, the fact that you lost your job is the best thing that ever happened to you. 

Remember, you’re not unemployed … you’re haven’t been downsized … you got dumped like a cheerleader the morning after the prom so it’s time to buck up and take your life by the horns. It’s time to learn everything you need to know about blogging, making money online and building your expertise so that you’re no longer working for others, you’re working for yourself.

In my blog over the past few months I’ve told you how to register your domain name and setup a website without hiring somebody like me to do it for you, and I’ve told you how to find the best software like WordPress to run your website and I’ve told you how to increase traffic to your website. In fact, I’ve told you everything you need to know to be successful on the Internet, so now the big question … what should you write about?

Here are five easy ideas for you to write a blog about and say goodbye to a hard day’s work forever:

Write about your industry

I was amazed the other day when another blogger (I totally forget where it was now) made the comment that there’s always somebody behind you on the learning curve. That’s so true! If you’ve been let go, take advantage of your years of knowledge and write about your industry. This will do a few things, first it will help you make money but more importantly it’ll help build your expertise on a subject. There’s nothing like sending out resumes to people when you have a successful, industry recognized blog with your name on it to back that up.

Write about your hobbies

The interesting things about hobbies to me is that we do these things because we like them. The chances are, if you like them … so do other people. My hobbies? I like photography, cycling and designing websites (geek) so guess what I write blogs about? Yep … you guessed it and do you know what? Over a hundred thousand people a month like to read my websites.

Write about your community

People often over look the things around them, which is funny because I have a lot of friends who live on Prince Edward Island (home of Anne of Green Gables) and yet not one of them write a blog about the island. Actually when I tell them they should write about PEI they look at me like I’m nuts. Who would want to read about their dull little island (no offense, I love PEI)? According to Google, 1,233,143 people searched for information on their home in January! That’s insane, 1.2 million people are searching for a subject and they’re not blogging about it? 

Write about your life

There are 303,824,640 people living in America today … come on, you’ve got to have something in common with some of them. Write about it! If you’re a woman, write about being a woman in America. If you’re a man, write about that. If you’re a Cantonese American then write for the 65,000 people who search for more information on that subject in January.

Write about your TV schedule

Honestly, I’m not making this up. Let’s say that you’re unemployed and still a little depressed so you’re spending a lot of time sitting in front of the TV watching reruns of old Scooby Doo episodes … (I know I’m going to regret this) … write about it! If you’re watching it, others are watching it too and just like you, they want to know what are in Scooby Snacks.

Tell me what subjects you like to blog about, include a link below to your own blog!

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Posted in Blogging

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09
Jan
2009

How do I build traffic to my website?

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I’ll be honest, that’s the most common question that I get asked. Over, and over and … over again but there’s an easy answer, hard work and determination. Far too many people put up a website and assume it’ll be easy to build a loyal reader base or start a blog and sit back, waiting for the income to roll in. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works which of course leads me to the first important lesson about websites. If it was easy to make money on the web, web designers would never be available for hire, we’d all live in Whistler.

So, you have your domain name registered and you’ve setup hosting. Maybe you’ve already installed a great package such as WordPress and of course, you did this all by reading my great article called Can You Put Up a Web Site for Less Than $100? but now the moment of truth, how do you drive traffic to your website?

What is the value of traffic?

A few years ago I was sitting in a board room with the CEO, VP of Marketing and online marketing manager for —– Corporation. The marketing manager was just wrapping up a presentation and explaining that in order for the companies website to make money, they needed to drive 1,000,000 visitors a month to the site. Her math was based on the old rule of 10’s. For every ten people who come to your site, one will look around. For every ten who looks around … blah blah blah, anyways her proposal was that we needed to buy lots of ads (surprising since her department was in charge of buying ads) and then we could sit back and rake in the cash.

During this exchange I must have chuckled or snorted or something rude because the CEO turned and asked me if I had something to add. I then explained that we didn’t need 1,000,000 new visitors to the site, we simply needed 10,000 people interested in buying our product. In fact, I went as far as to tell them that for a fraction of the proposed marketing department budget ($100,000 a month) I could drive a million people a day to the site. How you might ask? Simple I would reply, buy $100k a month work of banners that simply read “Want to get f—-d? Click here.” … only without the dashes.

Obviously, my advice wasn’t well received but the fact still stands that getting traffic is not what you want, or at least it shouldn’t be what you want. I have a web template on my site that gets 30,000 hits a month … not one of those visitors converts into a lead. So, before we talk about how to get traffic to your website, the more important question is … what type of traffic do you want to get to your website?

How to generate traffic to a website

First off, let me go against every piece of advice you’ll find on SEO websites and tell you to forget Google. Heck, search my own website and you’ll find out that I’m back peddling on my own advice but maybe I’ve been drinking or something. My new, improved 2009 advice still stands, forget Google. If you want to build traffic to your website, focus on what really matters … content, content, content. Write good content, follow my next advice and respect your elders.

Build a strong site structure

We live in a world of RSS, smart phones, Wii surfers (280 of my visits last month came from Wii surfers), Sony PSP users, Mac users, people on Internet Explorer, FireFox and a ton of other systems. Don’t design a website to look good in a web browser (somewhere a designer just cried a little), instead design a website to function effectively in all browsers. This will help your site be accessible to the blind, perform well in automated crawlers and be readable to users. 

Be a positive part of the community

Use your website to help improve the internet, not take away from it. An old boss of mine gave a lecture once, he spoke about being assertive vs. being aggressive. Don is a brilliant speaker, he simplified the two words by defining assertiveness as  being willing to standup for your rights, while being aggressive required you to take away the rights of others.

This point really hit home for me and made me think about websites. Build assertive website, boldly proclaim your place on the Internet and stand for your believes but don’t be aggressive, there’s no reason to try to tear down others or over power them.

Give a little, get a lot

I wrote the other day about how I got a Google PageRank of 5, what I didn’t really touch on was the importance of giving back to those around you. The Internet is filled with some really remarkable people, some great websites and a lot of amazing blogs. Most of these people write daily, with little feedback from those who read their blogs. Take the time to comment on their articles when you see a piece of interest, thank them for advice and question them when you disagree. This doesn’t just give them a reason to keep blogging, it also gives your website some great exposure. My most popular incoming links? Those that link to an article on my own site, supporting a point on another blog.

What’s the lesson here? Contribute to every forum, blog, newsgroup, message board, social networking website and social discussion you can add something positive to but remember … nobody likes a self promoter, so make sure you have something positive to say.

Finally, read.

The best investment I ever made in my business was an RSS reader. Now I can’t live without it. My iPhone chirps away all day long, pulling down excerpts of articles by some of the Internet’s top performers … they’re literally giving away the secrets to their success, if only you’re willing to read.

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Posted in Marketing Advice

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04
Jan
2009

How to get a PageRank of 5

55 Comments

For those of you who know nothing at all about PageRanks and Alexa rankings, let me explain that they’re the modern equivenant of a Nielsen ratings for websites. 

Alexa measures your website performance by volunteer users, in effect millions of average people agree to allow Alexa to collect statistics about their surfing habits and from that data, Alexa tracks and monitors activity on the Internet. At Halloween this year, Alexa ranked my website at 2,291,883. Today it’s at 231,354 which is a 1790% improvement for spending about 20 minutes a day on my website.

Google on the other hand ranks your website by looking at who your website connects to and in return, who connects to your website. That’s a pretty over simplified way to look at it but it’s also the general gist of the method. It’s a bit like a popularity contest, Google believes that if websites with high page ranks (the system is from 0 to 10) link to you consistently, your content must be of a certain value.

So now that you understand what a PageRank and Alexa ranking mean, here’s how I earned my respectable rankings in both … (drum roll anybody?) … quality content, consistently posted.

I know that you’re all hoping for a much better answer than that but sadly it’s the truth. My very good friend Chris Bavota jumped from a PR0 to a PR4 in just three months, doing exactly the same thing … he posts great articles that people love to read and he makes sure that he does it regularly.

Chris and I followed some easy to understand advice:

Once that was done, both Chris and I did what any self respecting blog owner would do:

  • we used deep linking techniques to ensure our readers know about related content on our website
  • we posted links to other peoples blogs, helping our readers find similar content
  • we let other blog owners know that we had articles of interest for their readers

There are no scams, no black hat SEO techniques, no short cuts and no tricks. Quality rankings on a quality search engine takes nothing more than a little bit of effort, quality content and the determination to contribute something positive to the Internet as a whole.

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization

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10
Dec
2008

It’s easy to setup your domain name you don’t need to be an expert.

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Setting our GoDaddy settings to point to BlueHost

OK so the other day I wrote about the fact that you don’t need to hire a web guru to setup your website using something like Blogger, WordPress.com or BlueHost and yesterday I told you how to setup your own domain name such at a hosting company like GoDaddy or Domains At Cost but how do you combine them? Again, this is painfully simple and not just for spiffy web guys like me. Anybody can do this, so lets take a quick look at how it’s done.

In this example, I’m going to assume that you’re hosting your website at BlueHost and you’ve registered your domain name with GoDaddy, if you’ve done it else where the steps should be fairly simple to modify with a little bit of common sense and reading their Frequently Asked Questions section.

First … we need to point the domain name to the hosting company. We do this by logging into GoDaddy and editing something special called the DNS records. You can find this under your account Domain Manager. If you have multiple domain names, it will display a list and prompt you to select the one you’re looking to modify. At the top of the domain profile, there’s a button called Name Servers, we’re going to click that and expose the Custom Name Servers option where we simply type the name servers for BlueHost. The name servers for BlueHost are:

  • ns1.bluehost.com
  • ns2.bluehost.com
BlueHost setup process

BlueHost setup process

Once that’s done, setting up your hosting account at BlueHost takes about 15 minutes and requires very little technical knowledge.

Now that you’re in the Add Domain screen, specify the name of the domain you wish to setup and the wizard should fill out the rest of what you need for you.
Please note, in order to assign a domain to BlueHost the first step at GoDaddy must already be complete, sometimes this takes a few hours so my advice is after you’ve completed the process at GoDaddy take a couple of dollars from the money you just saved and go have a coffee.
Now you’re done. Your website will take between 24 and 48 hours to propagate which is a fancy Internet term for point to the right place. Once it’s done you’ll be able to setup your own emails and put up a website at your new address, which I will talk about later this week  so why not sign up for my email notification or RSS feed to stay connected.
In the interest of being honest, BlueHost pays me to refer people to them but I’d do it anyways. While you’re waiting for me to write something else, feel free to comment on any of my existing articles.

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Posted in Web Site Advice

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13
Oct
2008

How to Run a Successful Web Site For Your Church

4 Comments

Church was the original social marketing complete with blogs, events and groups but a lot of small communities are finding it hard to make the transition from sticky notes on a bulletin board to the modern world of web based community building.

I’ve written this article with smaller churches in mind, as well as community groups and centers who find it difficult to hire the web expertise required to run a successful online community. This tutorial is aimed squarely at small churches across the country who want to offer their members an online presence but want to ensure it’s done cost effectively. A few days back I posted an article called Can you put up a website for less than $100? that got a lot of attention, this piece is more about how to help small community churches and non profits.

How to get started

To get started, there are a couple of things that you’re going to need. First, you’ll need a website address and secondly you’ll need a place to host it. Hosting is a little like renting space for your church and a website address is just like the civil address your mail comes to, it’s there to help people find you.

Your website address can also be called a domain name and to get started, you’ll need to decide if you want to run your website with absolutely no costs or if you can afford $7 per year for your address. If you’d like to register your own website address, you can do so at BlueHost.com for $6.95 per year, with or without hosting. The other option is to use a free service such as http://wordpress.com/ where you can build and host your church website for free. Remember, if you choose to host your site for free at http://wordpress.com/, your website address will be something similar to http://yourchurchname.wordpress.com/ which is perfectly suitable for most small churches.

If you’ve elected to host your website with BlueHost.com or a similar hosting provider, you’ll need to install WordPress through their hosting support tool called Fantastico or by FTP’ing it to your web server. Once you’ve installed the tool, it’s time to make the site feel like your church.

WordPress and Themes

There are a number of attractive theme’s available for WordPress, each may be customized by a web developer to include your own church photos and name. Some that I have found while looking are:

What’s important to remember when it comes to WordPress is that you can make it look (and act) anyway you’d like. Simply make sure you pick a Theme that is right for you and somebody can always customize it later on. Also, keep in mind that a good design for a church is about people not the building. Your community wants to feel part of the site, just like they want to feel like part of the church.

Adding Content

When building content for your website keep in mind that every church should have some basic pages:

  • A calendar with upcoming events and links to important church functions
  • Office and sermon schedules, possibly even an outline of what you’ll be discussing
  • An online contact form or email that is checked regularly
  • Directions to the church, maybe even a link to Google Maps
  • A way for people to get involved, feedback forms are a great idea
  • Online donations, there are several cost effective ways to accept online payments
  • Downloads and links to electronic versions of church materials. Did you know you can download the complete Bible to an iPhone?
  • Subscription features such as an email newsletter or RSS feeds
  • Free content, updated regularly

If you’re hoping to squeeze a few extra pennies out of the budget, you can host for free with the right partner. While not contact me? If you’re a church or community group, I’d be able to help you find free hosting in return for a link back to my site.

How would you improve a church website? What features would you like to see?

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09
Oct
2008

Can you put up a website for less than $100?

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As a web professional, I love nothing more than opening my email first thing in the morning and having somebody ask me if I can build them a website for $100. Oddly, this happens a lot so I’ve decided to write a blog entry here on my site to help you do it yourself.

First, you’ll need to register a domain name.

A domain name is your address on the web, you’ll want to make it snazzy but simple. I recommend using a reputable hosting company to register your domain name. BlueHost will charge you $6.95 for a year.

Secondly, you’ll need a hosting account.

Again, I will recommend BlueHost since it’s where I host my website and I’ve had no problems in two years. Their basic hosting package is $6.95 per month which means your new website now costs $90.35.

Next you’ll need a website.

BlueHost comes complete with a service called Fantastico, once you’ve activated your account click the Fantastico link in your profile to install cool scripts on your new hosting account.

Look for WordPress, it’s the best choice to manage your website and is included for free as part of your BlueHost hosting account. Install WordPress in your base directory, when it’s done you’ll get a username and password as well as a link to your website manager.

Making your website look great.

Now that you’ve purchased a domain name, setup your hosting and installed WordPress as a website manager you’ll want to install a theme. Theme’s are what make WordPress websites look different from each other, there are literally thousands of free themes on the web. In fact, if you’d like to use one of mine, you’re welcome to use Minimalist Fixed, a free WordPress theme.

Update: October 18th – I’ve added two more themes in the last couple of days.

Adding Content

You can quickly add new content to your website by adding Pages in WordPress, this will automatically publish your new content to the website you setup earlier.

There you go, a fully functional website complete with a content manager for less than $100.

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22
Jan
2008

Web Sites for Artists

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We had a great meeting of the Fredericton Designers Group in which I promised a number of the new members to post a little more details about web hosting, websites and web marketing. This tutorial is meant as a high level introduction to the concepts of hosting a website for artists.

Web Domains

First off, a successful website needs a domain name. In my case, my domain is thisismyurl.com and it’s broken into two parts. The actual name “thisismyurl” and the Top Level Domain (TLD) which is the “com” portion of my name. Many people confuse the “www” as part of the domain, but really it’s what is called a sub-domain and can be literally anything that I want it to be.

A TLD can be .com, .net, .org or literally dozens of other options including country specific such as .ca or .co.uk. Many people also like to use country specific domains for special purposes such as the .tv domain which is really for the country of Tuvalu but can be used (for a fee) by anybody. Selecting the right TLD is important for artists as it says a lot about your business for example, if you are located in Toronto Canada you may like to use the .to TLD but the .la TLD makes little sense unless you’re in LA. Whenever possible, the .com TLD is still the best to purchase.

The next step in picking your domain name is to pick the name itself. Most common names are taken, as are a lot of combinations that you’d love to have so you have to be creative when coming up with domain names but be careful some companies take part in what’s called Front-Running which is basically a scam where they register domain names that are searched for and then hold the names for random. I use GoDaddy for my searches, to the best of my knowledge they’re legit.

Once you’ve picked your domain name and your TLD it’s time to register your domain. As I said, I use GoDaddy but there are hundreds of options out there, price should be a deciding factor for you as there’s very little else to judge the services based upon.

Web Hosting

Once you have a domain name, you need to start looking at web hosting. Web hosting is basically renting a small part of another computer that’s always connected to the Internet. Really there’s a lot more to it than that but basically … it’s a place for your website to live on the Internet.

For the past few years I have used BlueHost as my web host of choice. There’s a lot of reasons for this but basically, they’re fast, they’re friendly and they’re reliable. As an artist you should be focussed on your craft, not your hosting and BlueHost takes care of all the little problems for you.

Once you’ve signed up with BlueHost or your host of choice, you’ll have to tell GoDaddy where your website is located … think of it as forwarding your mail. Log into GoDaddy and click on the Domains option. Under “My Domains” you’ll find an option for Name Servers. You need to click the option for Custom Name Servers and replace the existing with “ns1.bluehost.com” and “ns2.bluehost.com”. This will tell GoDaddy that anybody coming to your domain should really go to BlueHost who will figure out what to do with you.

Websites

So now that you have a domain and hosting, you’re ready to have a website. There are literally thousands of ways to have a website and no one method is better than any other. In my opinion, the easiest way for a young artist to get on the website bandwagon is to install something called WordPress from the BlueHost control panel. Click Fantastico in your control panel to access the installer and walk though the steps to add WordPress to your base directory. In about a minute, you’ll have a world class, professional blog.

If you want something more custom, there are literally thousands of WordPress themes on the internet, you can hire a great (and local) web designer or you can learn to code your own. There are even companies who will turn your Photoshop artwork into WordPress themes for a small fee.

Summary

We’ve covered the technical matters of adding your website to the Internet in this post from the basics of registering a domain name to setting up a simple hosting and website account. Next time, I’ll introduce you to the secret art of self promotion on the web and how you can turn your simple website into easy cash.

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