Starting a business? Here are essential technology tips to get you going

Technology

Starting a business? Here are essential technology tips to get you going

By Alisha McKerron, former magistrate, freelance privacy lawyer and occasional blogger at deskof

Like it or not, gone are the days where we can set up a business without using the world wide web and expect to succeed. And we should rejoice; it has never been easier to set up a business with an online presence, cheaply and capable of scaling up with ease as we grow. There is room for everyone, not just the big players! I should know because I was able to set up my business called deskof within a day – and it only costs three flat white coffees a month to keep everything running.

Domain name, website and business email

The first step is our own domain name. This enables us to have our own company website and email address (i.e. a ‘you@ yourcompany.com’ address with our own business name instead of a generic one such as gmail.com or yahoo.com). Both are necessary to give our business a more professional look, help earn our customers’ trust as a legitimate business and promote our brand. So we must come up with a name – for example abcservices.com – perhaps using the name or trade name of a limited company we have incorporated. We can register it for a small annual fee with any domain registrar – I used Namecheap at a cost of £9.58 per year – or we can use a web hosting service (see below) to do this on our behalf. The latter typically does not charge for the first year’s cost of domain name registration.

Hosting our domain name

Next we need to choose somewhere to host our DNS. DNS (the Domain Name System) is how computers look up the internet addresses (IP addresses) for our new domain name. When you type “abcservices.com” into your browser, we need a DNS nameserver to translate that into the IP address of the server that hosts our website. Cloudflare is not a bad service to use, and they offer a generous free plan. But it’s not just a question of us opening an account – what is needed is inputting our domain name on Cloudflare for them to give us nameservers, to use set up on Namecheap and a 24 hour wait. If we do not feel confident enough to do this, we can rely on the same web hosting service provider mentioned above to do the domain mapping for us. They typically will do this for free provided that you use them to host your website.

Web hosting service & Content Management System

Web hosting service providers are necessary to get our website active and live on the internet. We can think of them as letting out space on a server where our website files will be placed. There are many to choose from. If we want to maintain a level of independence, we can use them to only host our website, in which case we would need to build our website ourselves on our computer to be uploaded to their server. Or we could use them not only to host our website but provide us with a CMS. CMS (Content Management System) is software that will help us create, manage, and modify content on our website without the need for specialized technical knowledge. I chose WordPress. com (Personal) at a cost of £39 to build my blog, because they provide an easy to use CMS.

Email system

Next we need to decide what email system we want to use. For a monthly fee of £4.60, I decided to use Google Workspace (Business Starter), not only because it allows me to have up to 30 email addresses per account – by creating email aliases such as accounts@abcservices.com – but because of the incredibly useful app it offers as well as 30 GB storage. This brings me to the next decision we need to make – which office suite to use.

Office suites

Although not yet long gone, one-time-installations of software on personal computers are being less used. And thank heavens for that, because associated with on-time-installations were installation and configuration problems, mandatory hardware purchases and back up worries. All of this is taken care of by “software as a service” (SaaS) offerings, such as Google Workspace or Microsoft Office 365, where we pay a regular subscription to get software served directly to us, hosted, pre-configured and ready to go. We are purchasing a service, meaning we do not own the software we buy. This may sound foreign to those of us who used to work for a large organisation, and haven’t given much thought to how work computers were set up. But rest assured SaaS products are easy to set up and use. Choosing a SaaS offering will come down to price and preference. Naturally as lawyers most of us will be familiar with Word and its ability to compare one document against another – an indispensable tool for many lawyers. If that’s the case then an annual subscription to Microsoft Office 365 is what we want. All the more so if you wish to use comments; sharing google documents with comments via a word file attachment rather than through a link may result in comments getting a little scrambled in the word conversion. However I opted for Google Workspace and have not looked back. (Although it did take time to get used to the concept of sharing documents via links as opposed to attachments to emails and to understand the value of search when it comes to filing documents). I believe I now have better control of my documents and am able to collaborate more easily. If we do not want to spend any money, we can use LibreOffice. It is free to download, works on most operating systems no matter how out of date, and feels similar to Word. It does not offer any services across devices but that shouldn't be a problem if we set up Dropbox – a cloud storage service, which enables us to copy files to the cloud and access them later, even if you’re using a different device. We may however have reservations about using a cloud storage service given our obligations to keep documents confidential and security concerns we may have. Both Google Drive and Dropbox offer two-factor authentication and encrypt your data when it’s in transit – from the cloud storage service to your device, and vice versa. Have a read of this.

What’s next?

The good news is that with the support of tech it has never been easier or more affordable to set up our own business. Even if you are not sure you want to make a start, you might want to put aside an hour or two a week to start looking at each issue. Any feelings of tech intimidation can easily be dispelled by reading the many helpful articles and video clips on the web. A business set up correctly today, will run efficiently, be competitive and scale up with very little difficulty. It’s up to us to tap into these amazing resources. ■