Website Design and Hosting
At Celtic Rose Design, we strive to
provide you with all the information you need to get a web
site designed, hosted and most importantly, making money for
your business. We have links to providers of all kinds of
services your website might need, and links to the experts
that can help you put a plan together to get your site
profitable as soon as possible.
In order to set up a successful (and profitable) website,
you must first define what success and profitable
mean. Everything in your web site design should
revolve around these initial ideas of success and profit.
You should have an experienced web designer to consult
with during this process, to get an understanding of the
different options available, and the costs of those
options, to achieve your proposed success and profit
goals.
After you have defined your success ad profit goals for
your website, it is time to choose the specific
technologies you will be using to create your web site.
There are basically 2 choices - Microsoft technologies
(ASP, .NET, MS-SQL, etc) and Open Source technologies
(Perl, PHP, MySQL). The 2 technologies are really very
similar in what they can do. Either one can create very
powerful and dynamic web pages, database driven sites,
and the like. However, generally speaking the Microsoft
technology solutions cost more to build and host then
the Open Source, but there is a big company there to
help (for a fee) if any problems arise. Because of
this, generally small to medium companies are better
off going with Open Source technologies (because of the
lower costs), and large companies go with Microsoft
technologies (because it makes them feel more secure).
One VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: the two classes of
technologies are NOT interchangable. Once you pick one,
if you decide later to change, your only real choice is
to thow out what you have and start from scratch (or
nearly so).
After you have set goals and chosen a technology, then
website development starts. This is the fun part, as the
web site comes together, and you can see the progress
that is happening. Unless your site is a very simple 5-
to 10-page site, the person putting it together should
be asking questions about your business at this point.
If questions are not being asked, you should start
asking questions to make sure that everything is being
done in a way that works for your business.
If your site is very complex, with animation and
data-base driven pages, then you may have several people
or groups of people working on your website. You may have
a graphics designer making all the "look and feel" stuff;
a database designer, putting the database together, and
getting the data to flow in all the right directions at
all the right times; an HTML person to get all the page
elements in the right places and working with all the
different browsers you want to support; and you
should have one person who is the "architect",
who is responsible for the overall design and the final
Quailty Assurance. If something is not right, it is their
job to figure out who is responsible and get them to fix
it in a timely manner.
Then, after the website is all put together, you need to
implement your traffic plan - what methods are you going to
use to drive traffic to the web site? One person I know
simply plastered their URL on everything seen by
people outside the company, and they generated 3500 hits
per month! But, that took 2 years to build up to level of
traffic and is the exception. And remember, traffic plans
are NOT static - they require constant monitoring and
tinkering. So, you should budget some money for that.
However, a web site without traffic is like a car without
gas, so figure out a plan you can live with and stick to
it! With good planning and an experienced web architect,
your web site WILL be successful!
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