I’m not talking about how to avoid rude, crude, lewd, or unfair comments by people on the Internet. For some reason, the Internet brings out extreme qualities in people and people who are naturally rude and contentious in real life can get pretty obnoxious online. That’s not what I’m talking about today (although it’s a worthy subject).
Instead, I want to address problems writers can have when they try to start an online enterprise. Enterprise here can mean an actual business (like “buy my e-book” or “sign up for my online home-study course”) or more of a promotional enterprise (like a blog or a website that advertises your writing business). The web is a very different medium than most of us trained-for-print writers know about.
You can get a black eye building your website (or having it built). How much does it cost to build a website? Well, you might as well ask how much it costs to go on vacation. It depends–not just on how much you want to spend but what you want to do and how you want to do it. If you have the skills, you can probably build a super-great website for under $100. But few of us have the skills! If you hire a designer or web professional to build your site … expect to spend thousands, even if they give you a deal!
- When I realized how much it can cost to build a site, I started to learn how to do it. My reasoning was that investing a few thousand in learning website architecture was money well spent–since I could use it for other websites and business. If you’re only going to ever need one website, this may not be good reasoning for you.
- I also learned that you can outsource portions of your website. For instance, you can build the basic site and then hire somebody to add a forum to it or to design the header or to create some Flash graphic.
- However, I also learned that there are very few easy, comprehensive, logical guides that take you from ground zero to a fully functional website. You are going to have to get a lot of your education piecemeal.
You need to get a URL. That’s the “name” of your website. You do this by registering it at a business called a registrar. There are lots of them. I like GoDaddy.com but there are lots of others. (Google “domain registrar” to find other ones.) You just follow the onscreen prompts and you can get your name.
- As a general rule, dot-com is better than any of the other extensions, like dot-tv or dot-me or dot-info.
- Lots of domain names are taken. In general, you often have to add a word or phrase to get what you want. For instance, if you want “cameras.com” that’s probably taken. But if you get narrower and narrower you can probably find something that works like “CameraTipsForWriters.com.”
- In general, search engines favor domains that are descriptive. Make sure it matches the content of your site. If you know what keywords are, try to use your main keyword in the URL, aka domain name.
- What about hyphens? Some folks say not to use hyphens, but I disagree. I do think a short, non-hyphenated domain name is best but I think it you can get a great name with a hyphen, it’s fine.
You also need a host. There are lots of host companies out there and many sell you packages which allows you to host more than one domain. This is good if you want to be an online mogul. Know that you need one root or parent domain even if you get a package that lets you host one hundred sites or more. One of my favorite hosts is Hostgator.com but there are lots of others.
- There are some companies where they try to get you to register the site and get hosting all in one deal. This may not be bad but be sure if you register the domain name that YOU OWN IT and not the hosting company. Sometimes hosting companies register it on your behalf but they actually own it.
- If you’re thinking multiple websites, here’s how it works. You have one root domain. Then you do add-on domains. Those are separate sites. You can also do sub-domains which are folders under a specific site–think of a sub-domain as a site-within-a-site. Some people do a site and put a blog on the sub-domain.
- Most of these sites work off of a c-panel or control panel. The control panels I see all of the time have online prompts and tutorials. Get familiar with this stuff and it gets 100% easier. Time spent learning the c-panel will pay off later on.
Those are a few of the early technical pitfalls. But you can also mess up your site by not having a clear purpose in mind. Make sure you know who your site targets, what your targets want, and generate content that meets that objective.
Your site can also flounder if you let it get out of date. You need to keep refreshing content often. Daily isn’t too often, although for most of us, it is a bit impractical. Wordpress and Joomla sites have options that let you “time-release” content, which can come in handy when you’re on vacation or otherwise don’t have access to your computer.
Your site will also fail if you don’t get traffic. Traffic may be one of the most difficult subjects of all. Fortunately, for writers, it’s no biggie. We’ll be starting a series on website traffic this month. Even if you don’t have a website, check it out. In fact, you’re better off if you don’t have a site … because what you learn about TRAFFIC now can help you create the right kind of site.
