Making things for the web

Five things to consider for a new website

We often build sites for clients who haven't had one before and I thought it would be useful to list a few tasks that should be completed at the beginning of the process.

Register your domain name. A good domain name is vital for your site and making sure one that a suitable one is available before you do anything else is vital. This is particularly relevant for author sites as they tend to use their own name. Don't forget you can sperate a domain name out using a "-" so if yourname.com has gone you might be able to get your-name.com instead. If you are starting a company check you can get a decent URL that matches your company name and register this when forming the company. Do this straight away! It might be stating the obvious but it's not unheard of for a site to be built and and the domain hasn't been purchased. Also make sure you set the domain to auto renew, it's quite embarrassing to have your site disappear because you didn't renew.

Don't forget about the other variations of your domain name. Depending on your site you may want to purchase the .co.uk .net and perhaps other Top Level Domain's (TLD's). It's also worth considering whether you want to control variations of your domain name if it has two words separated by the"-".

Register your name on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Even if you don't plan to use them much it's better than somebody else registering it.

List your business on Google Maps, you can do this through the Google Local Business Centre.

Don't leave the stock holding page from your domain registrar up, put up a simple holding page with maybe contact details, teaser info and a sign up form. This will inform people of who owns the site and that a proper one will be coming soon. The domain will be indexed by the search engines and you start building a list of interested users to email when the site launches. If you are going to do a bit of social networking you can add your Twitter details here and start to build up followers and build an audience for your site.

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Posted by james

on 12/01/2010

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