To get a business or personal website up and running, you will need two things: 1) Your website pages need to be created and 2) You need someone to host your site on a web server to access the World Wide Web. Creating your website and hosting your site are two separate issues. Designing a website is similar to designing an advertisement for a magazine or creating a brochure. Hosting can be compared to running your advertisement for a specific length of time.

As with most things in business, the most important part of creating your website is planning. You will need to plan your design and how it is organized to serve your visitors. We at RAS Interactive will help you with this process. The key for success is having a clear idea about what you want to accomplish with your site and who your target audience is. This information helps us develop a site that meets your expectations.

The customer is always the key to your business success, both on and off the web. The focus of your site should be on the customer. Make it easy for them to do business with you. Keep it simple. If the customer can't find what they want - they will leave and go somewhere else. You will need to decide whether you want to have your own domain name (for example, "http://www.yourcompany.com") or host your site as a sub-site on another website (for example, "http://www.rasinteractive.com/yourcompany/"). Each has advantages and disadvantages. Since it is nearly impossible to predict exactly what response you will get from your website, it is usually better to start small and build more features into your website gradually. Once your website is up and running, you can always add features or modify the information on your website.

The second thing you need is hosting. Hosting is a service provided most often by an Internet service provider. Your website is placed on their web server which makes it available on the Internet. The service provided, as well as the cost, is determined by the level and type of service required, for example, a website that requires a database or a secure shopping cart. Most providers have multiple plans to accommodate your needs.

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The length of time to complete your website depends on your needs. Websites may be simple or quite complex. If you choose to have a small site which includes a few pictures and some basic information about your company, it may only take a few hours to complete your entire website. If you want to include numerous pictures and/or descriptions of many products, custom graphics, active content that interacts with your visitors, complex designs, a searchable database, a company directory, price lists, or other special features your website will take additional hours to design and complete. Also, a domain name (http://www.yourcompany.com) requires several days to be established before your clients can visit your site.

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Three different costs are associated with any website - registering a domain name, hosting and website design. You can register for a domain name for $35.00 a year or less. There are many registrars available to register your domain name, and you will find that prices and services vary. RAS Interactive can register for your domain name when we set up your hosting account. This fee is paid to the registrar and is not part of your hosting or website design costs.

The price for hosting your website varies. Many Internet Service Providers do offer free hosting included with their service accounts. However, this free hosting is often for personal use only and commercial websites are prohibited. Additionally, free services usually do not allow the use of domain names and frequently place commercial ads for their clients on your pages. The charge for professional Internet hosting can be either on a monthly or a yearly basis. Monthly service usually starts at about $19.95 a month. It can be as low as $9.95 or into the hundreds of dollars for very large complex websites. You need to be careful when choosing a Web hosting service. There are wide variations in fees and services offered by hosting companies. Make sure that you know what you are paying for. Check reliability, speed of access, bandwidth (how many visitors are able to see your site at one time, redundancy, technical support staff availability, the ability to maintain service through power outages, do they make regular data back-ups. A low price does not always indicate a good deal.

The cost of your website design is driven by your needs. A basic web page with a logo, some images, hyperlinks, and text can be inexpensive. The price will increase as pages, links, and more features are added. RAS Interactive will work with you to help keep your cost within your budget.

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One of the best ways to approach this is to search for sites on the Internet that are similar to the website that you are planning to have created. Check out websites that your competitors have established or those for companies in a similar business. Your competitors have already spent the time planning their company site. Analyze these websites, find what you like and don't like about them. What concepts have they used that will work to your benefit? What do they do poorly? You don't want to copy them, but these sites can be an excellent source of ideas.

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None at all, you can actually have your own website without even owning a computer. However, if you would like to see that website, you should probably have a computer with connectivity to the Internet through an Internet Service Provider and an e-mail address. If you choose RAS Interactive to create your website, we will transfer it to the web server of your choice and will ensure that it is up and running properly. You may configure your website to direct people to call you or send you e-mail.

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RAS Interactive can help you decide if you should have your own domain name. You have two choices, your own domain name, like http://www.yourcompany.com”, or as a sub web on another site, like “http://www.internetserviceprovider.com/yourcompany”. Choosing your own domain name adds stature and legitimacy to your website and business. A domain name is almost always a worthwhile investment. Having your own domain name provides additional name recognition, advertising for your business, and, when used in your other forms of advertising, lends stature to your company. Having a domain name is also much easier to remember and to promote than an address like “http://www.internetserviceprovider.com/yourcompany”. One other downside to the second address is what can happen if you need to change your service provider – your website address would have to change. All your advertising, business cards, and any other printed material with the old address would have to be updated to reflect a new website address and e-mail address.  If you own your domain name, you can transfer it to a new hosting service. The name would stay the same and your e-mail addresses would stay the same.

There are some benefits to hosting on another website’s server. The first is lower cost. You would not have to register a domain name for yourself, saving the $35 per year. Also, the monthly cost for hosting would probably, but not necessarily, be cheaper. The last possible benefit would be the association between your site and the hosting site. It could lend some credibility to your business.

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RAS Interactive will work with you to keep the price of your Web site within your budget. Although we will offer as much assistance as you need, you can do several things to save money. The more prepared you are the less time we need to turn your ideas into your website. The planning phase for your website could take several hours by itself. If you analyze some of your competitors' websites or websites you would like to emulate, write down what you like and dislike, get an idea of how you might organize your site, it will provide an excellent platform to start the design process. RAS Interactive can help with this by providing questionnaires that ask for key information. You should also provide your content information on your company, product or services in an editable format on a disk, CD or via e-mail. This will save you time and money since we can then just reformat the information to the desired web presentation and not have to re-type and proofread it. Please consider that, while price is always important, your website is your virtual storefront. You would never consider having a poorly kept store with shoddy signs and advertising in your store windows, because it reflects on you and your business – you would try and create a respectable and professional appearance; one that makes your customers welcome and comfortable about doing business with you. You website is your virtual storefront and needs to reflect the professionalism and quality your customers can expect from you when they do business with you. First impressions are very important.

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You! Whether you sell products or services, want to advertise your business, want to communicate with clients or employees or just want a great way to keep your friends and family up to date on what is going on with your life or perhaps celebrate a family event like a wedding, you can clearly benefit from having your own website. Your business website provides your customers with access to your company 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You can also be reached from all over the world. Your website and domain name provide constant, consistent, and updateable advertisement for your company and can significantly boost name recognition. If you are in business, you probably receive many phone calls from prospective customers. The questions they ask are usually very similar. They would like more information about your products, services, or company, or perhaps would like to get a price estimate. Once these potential customers have their questions answered  - often in more than one phone conversations – then they may decide to choose a different provider. This frequently requested information can be placed on your website. Direct your customers to this information on your website in all of your advertisements and you will find that you can reduce the number of these redundant and often unproductive phone calls. With a website, you can make your potential customers more at ease and open to your products and services because they can learn about your business and make their buying decisions in the privacy of their homes, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You will benefit by having a more productive staff that doesn’t have to answer phone calls all day long and can concentrate on improving your profitability.

On the personal side, friends and family in this day and age are often busy and quite far apart. It can be difficult to keep close with them even though you know in you heart that you need to keep in touch. A personal website, for family, special events, or perhaps even family history can help solve this problem and bring everyone in your circle of family and friends closer.  Many Internet service providers offer free personal space to their customers for websites. We at RAS Interactive would be glad to design a family or event website for you. All you need to do is provide the information about your family or the event you are celebrating along with photographs, if you want them and we will help you reestablish that connection. An event website can even be a wonderful wedding present for your son or daughter. With a wedding website, you can keep friends and family up to date on all the particulars about the wedding, where it will be held, times, places where out of town guests can stay, sightseeing information, and, of course, links to stores where the bride and groom are registered. If there are last minute changes, you couldn’t find a faster way to get the word out. Just post the changes on your wedding website. You could even have a number of secure pages just for the wedding party to manage the intimate details like dress fittings and rehearsals.

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Website’s are often an evolving medium. RAS Interactive will be glad to evaluate your current website and provide suggestions for improvement or redirection to meet your desired goals. We will look behind the pages to the code that created them and see how it can be done faster and with a solid focus on your customer. Web browsers and operating systems have changed significantly over the last few years and designing a website to display well on different browsers, at different screen resolutions, and on different operating systems can be challenging. Remember that each visit to your website is a one on one experience for your visitor and if your website doesn’t display well for them, they won’t blame their software – they will feel you didn’t build a functioning website. We will also check your site for ease of navigation, broken hyperlinks, quick loading time, and user-friendliness. Remember, if your visitor can’t find it on your website, they can’t buy it.

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While a website is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your products and services to a potentially worldwide market, there are, unfortunately, unscrupulous businesses and individuals who may see your website and take advantage of you. You may receive any number of mass e-mail advertising from these people. These e-mails are unsolicited and many of these offers and companies are not legitimate and may use devious ploys. This type of mass, un-requested e-mail advertising is called "spam". Most reputable businesses do not send spam. If you do get spam e-mail, we encourage you to never respond to them. You can find out more about spam at http://www.cs.ruu.nl/wais/html/na-dir/net-abuse-faq/spam-faq.html. If you suspect that the spam you have received advertises questionable/illegal goods or services report it to the United States Federal Trade Commission at uce@ftc.gov. RAS Interactive does not support or condone the use of spam.

A better approach is to provide your customer an opt-in email service. The customer chooses to be added to your e-mail list. This provides you with a list of contacts that are actively interested in your company, your product and your services.

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You can’t just create a website, no matter how wonderful, and expect people to just find it. That would be like walking into a library and expecting the book you were looking for to be handed to you as you walk in the door. You need to advertise your website and register it with a number of popular search engines. RAS Interactive can help you get your site noticed. We will design your pages to foster good search positioning and can assist you with developing content to increase your website’s positioning in a search. We will be glad to register your website with many of the major free search engines as part of our regular hourly fee or you can register your website yourself. If we create and design your website we will register your site with these free search engines at no extra charge. In addition to these free search engines, there are several important search engines, Yahoo for example, that now require a submission fee or will speed up their processing – which can take a number of weeks – for a fee. As it can take anywhere from 2-6 weeks to list your website, it can be several months before you start seeing a steady stream of visitors. It is always a good idea to use all means of advertisement at your disposal to announce your new website, particularly if it is focused on your local community.

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This is an interesting question, isn’t it? If you are not sure what is involved in getting a web site up and running for your company, here it is in a nutshell. There are really only three ways to approach it. Let’s look at the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

• The Do-It-Yourself Solution: Create and maintain your web site yourself.

• The Split Solution: Have an external party create the web site. Then, you do the regular updating of the site yourself.

• The Outsourced Solution: Have an external party create and update the site.

The Do-It-Yourself Solution

Advantages

• This is the cheapest solution.

• You don't need to pay any fees to consultants. If you enjoy being creative and have the time, this could be an enjoyable and rewarding activity.

• You'll have complete control over your web site's "look and feel."

• There's no chance of a consultant handing you a site that isn't what you wanted.

Disadvantages

• DIY sites often look amateurish. This can turn away customers.

• DIY sites often have poor navigation controls. In a well-designed site, the user should be able to find what they want in seconds. Achieving this is not as easy as it sounds.

• You'll need to obtain some suitable software and then spend time learning how to use it -- perhaps a lot of time.

• You will need to learn the arcane secrets of effective META tags, JPEG compression, browser compatibility, FTP clients, loading speed and more if you want the site to perform well.

Skills Needed

• Patience: This will all take time.

• Good PC skills; e.g. a familiarity with both text and graphics applications.

• Technical skills or the willingness to acquire them.

• Graphic design and page-layout skills.

• Knowledge of the technical options for hosting and search engines.

The Split Solution

Advantages

• You'll need far less technical knowledge.

• The graphic design, page layout and navigation elements of the site will all be done for you thus avoiding many of the pitfalls that strike amateur designs.

• A consultant will probably produce the site faster than you can.

• If you have the skills, the desire, and the time to update the site yourself, this may be the best trade-off between price, speed and professionalism.

Disadvantages

• You'll still need to have (or learn) some technical skills, but not nearly as many as with the DIY solution.

• Consultant's cost may be hundreds of dollars. The larger, more complex a site is, the more it will cost.

• You run the risk of the consultant not providing the design that you were looking for.

• Major changes or upgrades to the site will probably need to be done by the consultant.

• When you update the site yourself you risk "breaking" something or just "messing it up."

Skills Needed

• Some technical skills or a willingness to acquire them.

• The ability to work with your consultant about how you want the site to look and what you want it to achieve.

The Outsourced Solution

Advantages

• You are not required to spend time and effort learning technical skills that other folk already know and (let's be honest here) can probably do better.

• This requires the least effort on your part.

• A consultant, like RAS Interactive, will produce the site faster than you can.

• This should produce a professional looking site that navigates easily, loads quickly, is compatible with all browsers and works well with search engines.

• Your ideas are transformed by a professional designer to create a site that will focus on your customers.

Disadvantages

• This is the most costly solution.

• You have less control over the technical details of the site.

Skills Needed

• The ability to work with your consultant about how you want the site to look and what you want it to achieve.

Conclusions

Choosing between these solutions comes down to two main issues: your budget and your skills. If you have the specific skills needed and the extra time required you could save some money in consultants' fees. If not, consider bringing in a professional consultant to design the site for you and, perhaps, to do the updates as well while you concentrate on the core processes of your business.

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