GreenEarth速 Cleaning
TIPS ON BUILDING A
WEBSITE Registering domain names Selecting a web host Building a site Registering your site Managing your site
STEP BY STEP A
D I Y
g e t t i n g
s t a r t e d
g u i d e
Topics
Step 1
Selecting and reserving a domain name.
Step 2
Selecting and contracting with a hosting company.
Step 3
Deciding your business goals.
Step 4
Building your website.
Step 5
Registering your website.
Step 6
Managing your website.
Websites are great marketing tools. But they are also expensive and complicated. Many of our Affiliates have asked us for help with low cost solutions for developing websites. And while our vision is to be able to someday include websites in the tool kit of marketing resources we offer Affiliates, we are not there yet. That’s why we put together this guide. To be of assistance to you as you as you think through and navigate the process of putting together a website. We hope that these best practice tips and resource suggestions are helpful to you. Please remember this is not a comprehensive how-to guide. There are plenty of good resources for that, once you map out a plan. If you do determine that you want to build a website, or improve the site you currently have, we suggest that you also invest some time in learning about search engine optimization and website design, two topics beyond the scope of this document but vital to understand.
WHY WE DEVELOPED THIS GUIDE
Your Domain Name
Your domain name is the URL address of your website. You need to purchase it from a registrar company who will host it for you and charge you a nominal yearly fee.
Start by brainstorming a list of names you would like to have. Lots of URL names are already taken so be prepared to be creative and flexible. There are several things to consider when selecting a domain name; one of the most important is search engine optimization. You want a name that is going to be found by people searching online for a dry cleaner in your community, so including “drycleaner” or “cleaner” in your domain name is smart. If you are marketing your green difference, having a word in your url that connotes “green” is also smart. But don’t get too carried away and end up with a long, hard to remember URL. Keep it short and easy to remember.
Next, see which domain names are available and register them. As you do, a few things to keep in mind. It is best to contract for your domain with a different outfit than where you plan to have your site hosted; otherwise, it could be difficult to move your site to a different hosting service later on. Lots of companies offer packages that allow you to register your domain and host in one package price—in our view, the cost savings do not outweigh the potential downside should you decide you want to have your site hosted somewhere else later on. Choose the option to keep your domain name private. A private domain registration keeps your information (name, email address, etc.) out of the global Internet database and helps prevent a lot spam from reaching your email box. Make sure that when you register the domain that you list yourself as the Administrative Contact, not the hosting company. This ensures that if for any reason you move the site or the hosting company goes out of business, you still own the domain. If possible, protect your name by registering multiple extensions (.net, .org, etc.). This will deter people from copying your name. For example, if you own greenercleaner.com you can also register greenercleaner.net and any other extensions that are available. You don’t have to build your site on all the domains you purchase, just reserve the extensions to keep your competitors from owning them. You can register your domain name anywhere, and there are literally hundreds of options. Here are the biggest ones (click to visit their website): Go Daddy® eNom® YummyNames Network Solutions® 1&1 Internet AG
Your Website Host
Your web host is the company that owns the server where your website files are stored and accessed. While there are some free online hosting options (e.g. sites.google.com, justfree.com), we would not recommend them for business use as the number of pages, file sizes, etc, are very limited.
Research and select your web host. It is possible to contract for web hosting at a reasonable cost ($10-$20 a month, plus set-up fees). As you do, consider your future needs, as well as your needs today. How much storage space will you need? Will you have video on your site? What kind of customer service support will you need? Read ahead about website building before you decide on your hosting strategy. If you elect to use an online template solution, many of these are hosted solutions, meaning that the website development comes “free” with your monthly hosting costs. If you go this route, you will not be able to select an independent host. Some reputable options and what we know about them (click to visit their website): ThinkHost. ThinkHost, powered by 100% renewable energy - it’s earth friendly hosting. They offer unlimited sever space, bandwith, MySQL databases, email accounts and FTP access on Unix-based servers for $7.95 a month, with a 100% uptime guarantee. Their focus is small businesses, community based groups and non-profits. BlueHost. Offers unlimited disk storage, unlimited monthly data transfer, host unlimited domains on one account, 2500 POP / WebMail addresses, 50 MySQL databases, free control panel, 24/7 network monitoring, 99% uptime guarantee, mirrored storage backups, no hidden fees, voted best support several years running. DreamHost™. Offers 1 TB disk storage, 10 TB bandwidth, free domain, unlimited databases, 3000 email accounts, unlimited domain forwarding. GoDaddy.com. The world’s largest web host. Offers up to unlimited disk space, unlimited transfer, unlimited MySQL databases, unlimited websites, and 1,000 email accounts. Free set-up, free auto-install of over 50 applications and no annual commitment, 99.9% network uptime and Go Daddy’s world-class data centers keep you up and running. Virtual dedicated and dedicated servers also available. Laughing Squid. An independently owned and operated web host, based out of San Francisco, that provides friendly, dependable and secure web hosting services to small businesses, artists, individuals, bloggers and non-profits. They are open source and focused on a more personal solution. Requirements: PHP 4.3 or higher, MySQL 4.0 or higher, Apache or nginx recommended.
Your Business Goals The kind of website you build is determined by what business goals you are trying to accomplish, who your customers are and what the needs of those customers are.
Decide the business goals of your website. Are you looking to pull in new customers searching for drycleaners online? Do you just want to have a website to build your image with existing customers or potential investors, to round out your professionalism? Are you promoting routes and need an online tool to attract and manage customers? Do you just want to start a blog as a reputation-building tool? Each objective might be best satisfied by a different approach. If in fact what you want is a blog, not a website, we would recommend that you use WordPress; they are the best and biggest blog solution provider, easy to use even without technical knowledge, and very search engine friendly. No need to look any further. Click here to learn how to optimize your blog for search engines.
Determine the outline, pages and functionality of your website. This will be driven by what you are trying to accomplish of course, but it is best to start out with a clear idea of the blueprint that you are building on. It is helpful to look at your competitor’s sites to see what they are doing. Want to see what kind of traffic your competitors are getting on their websites? Go to Quantcast and enter their URLs into the search box. You can see how many visitors they get and what their demographic profile looks like.
Create a keyword list. Keywords are the search terms people use to find things on search engines like Google. People search, and search engines look, for specific words and phrases; you will want to build your pages and write the copy for them with this list in mind. Jot down all the words you think people will use when they search for a drycleaner online. This list will be your guide as you write copy for each of the pages on your site— each page on your site should feature a few different keywords so that search engines will find your site. A good starter list: drycleaning, dry cleaning (two words), drycleaner, dry cleaner (two words) greenearth, green earth (two words), greenearth cleaning green cleaning, green dry cleaning, green dry cleaner environmentally friendly dry cleaning, eco-friendly dry cleaning, non-toxic dry cleaning odor-free dry cleaning One caution: when you are drafting copy for your web pages, do not “key word stuff” each page with too many key words from your list. Search engines do not like this. Make sure each page has a few important key words on it, vary them throughout your site.
Building Your Website As mentioned in the previous section, what you want to accomplish with your website will help determine the approach you select to build it. Budget is the other critical consideration.
Calculate a budget for buildout and maintainence. A website is an ongoing investment of both time and money--once you have a site up and running, you will need to keep it updated and fresh, so you should plan for it as an ongoing initiative. The cost of building a site can vary greatly depending upon your business goals and the method you use to build it, and can run anywhere from “free” to a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, or more. Generally, spending less means you will have more limitations and less control/flexibility. Regardless of how much money you spend, you need to be willing to invest alot of time in the process. Some things to consider:
If a website would help you grow your business, factor this into your decision. How much is a new customer worth and how many new customers can you expect to get with an online presence? One way to estimate this is to estimate how much traffic you could expect to generate per month and a “conversion rate” or percent of visitors you can expect to turn into new customers.
Beware of “freeware”. You can definitely put up a website using “free” online website builder templates. But, unless you have expertise in the area of web development, trying to put up a truly professional website this way is a little bit like trying to save money by having your car mechanic also do your dental work. The website builder template sites, by definition, are one-size-fits-all solutions—they are not individually designed for your business needs or to make the pages of your website rank high on search engines, or to visually appeal to prospective customers. So if your goal is to have an online magnet to pull in customers who are searching on Google, Yahoo or Bing to find a drycleaner, a template solution may not work for you right out of the box.
Template approaches are not all alike. As you evaluate your options, you will want to research and evaluate them based not just on creative look and feel and ease of use, but also which will allow you to optimize individual pages for search engine optimization (SEO) and whether it will be able to grow with your business needs over time. Here are a few considerations to help you evaluate the different online options vs. desktop or professional website development: Do I, now or sometime in the future, want to bring in my own designer, or can my needs be met within the existing templates online? If you feel you will someday want to have creative control, you will want to use a desktop option so that you own your own files. There are low cost options for this like Interspire discussed below, and there are also free software options with customizable templates that can be downloaded to your desktop, Joomla is one example we discuss below, but these are going to be more complicated and involve a bigger time investment to learn what you need to know to utilize the technology. Getting a college student or freelancer to help you put a site together using free, open source software may be an affordable hybrid approach allowing you to have your cake and eat it too. Is there a limit on the number of pages I can have on my website, or on the number of images I can have on a page? Some of the template sites and the hosting packages limit the number of pages you can have on your site.
Building Your Website Can I write my own individual title tags and meta description tags, one at a time? Many of the online templates do not allow this. Can I write as many words on my pages as I want? Some of the templates will limit the amount of copy you can include on each page. Can I access the robots.txt portion and CSS of my website? This is important for SEO and design modifications later on. If I run into a technical problem, what kind of customer support can I expect? Some offer no support, some offer chat and email support and some offer phone support. Consider your needs carefully before you comit. With these questions in mind, here are some thoughts on a few of the ways you can get your website built. As you evaluate options, even DIY approaches, one idea to consider is engaging the services of a professional to support you. A freelance professional web expert can save you a lot of time, headaches and future expenses. When you are venturing into an area where you do not have expertise, like website development and search engine optimization, it is important to be able to call someone for questions and troubleshooting, and this is not a feature offered by a “free” website builder.
A breakdown of your options. 1. “Free” Do-It-Yourself Online Templates. There are a fair number of free website builders online that you can use to create a website by customizing online templates, without needing to know how to write code or have any technical knowledge. As stated above, the problem with many of them is that they are not designed to allow unique title tags and meta descriptions for each page, which makes it hard to get your site ranked by search engines, so check them out carefully before you commit your time if SEO is important to you. Most “free” template providers make their money through hosting, so if you elect to build your website this way they will likely also be hosting your site. Others make their money with “subscription” memberships, and generally have a “link back” requirement that permanently connects your site to theirs. Always check the terms of use to be sure you understand what you are and are not getting and to ensure you have the right to use the site for commercial purposes without infringing on a copyright. Another string attached to “free” templates is their limited flexibility. Although you will have options to personalize your site with images, color schemes, logos, font, etc, generally what you see is what you get. You also won’t own your files so you can’t take them with you if you elect to move your site, or modify their layout and functionality beyond what is in the original template. Some of the most popular template options are (click to visit website): GoDaddy. With the caveat that big freeware sites like GoDaddy are not dedicated to giving much in the way of individual and attention and support, GoDaddy is one of the big daddy online template website builders. The templates are fairly basic and easy to use. If you do select GoDaddy, click here for some helpful tips. Homestead. Owned by Intuit, Homestead offers some of the more creative templates out there and many small businesses can build a good site with their templates. If you use Homestead, click on this blog entry for some helpful tips. Yahoo. Yahoo’s small business site builder has a wide variety of basic templates for Yahoo hosted sites.
Building Your Website Their customer service support has gotten some poor online reviews, though the same is likely also true of other large-scale free templates. Can handle and interface with third party software like Dreamweaver. Other sites include: Site2You Websitewizard Free100templates TemplateBox
2. Low Cost Do-It-Yourself Online Templates. If you prefer to keep your hosting options open and/or want more control of your website, you still have many online template options. Generally with purchased templates, you will receive the original graphics files, allowing you to make further customization and/or modifications to your website down the road. As with the options above, you run the risk of other people having sites that look and feel exactly like yours. These sites generally do give you two choices however: a template that other sites can also use (prices run from $20-$500) or a “buyout” option that allows you to buy a complete website design and remove it from list of templates so that no one else can use it (prices range from $2,000$12,000). Options include (click to visit website): Top100Templates WebsiteTemplates The sites below, as well as a few of the “free” sites listed above, offer customization help for an additional fee, as well as options to contract for ongoing tech support, which can be very important when your website needs updating or you run into technical issues. TemplateMonster TemplateTuning
3. Free Do-It-Yourself Desktop Software Templates. You can build your own site using free templates built from open source software. You do not need to know website code to build a website this way, but it is not for the faint of heart, there is a steep learning curve. For those willing to invest the time to “go to school” or the money to hire a college student or freelancer, the reward is a site whose code you own and control 100%. If you are going this route, choose a Content Management System that offers templates for websites, this makes it easy to modify and update your site in the future. The big three are: Joomla. The name Joomla means ‘all together’ in Swahili (Urdu), and this software tries to be just that. It is not as user friendly as WordPress, but it is the best open source CMS template option we know of, and growing quickly. They have more templates and out of the box functionality than Drupal, though their CMS is said to be less powerful. Drupal. This software has the most powerful CMS behind it, but it’s definitely more developer-friendly than designer or user-friendly. It supposedly can be used by non-developers willing to invest time in learning how to use it. If you know a developer that knows PHP, a good solution is to hire them (likely between $1,000 and $5,000) to help you. Modules are especially powerful. Used by some high-quality
Building Your Website
sites like the BBC, the Onion, Nasa, Greenpeace UK. WordPress. This is the most user-friendly CMS site builder out there, and great for SEO; however, it was originally built to be a blog builder, not a website builder. That does not mean you cannot adapt it to build a website, only that it will take some extra work and research to find the work-arounds, as it is less developer-friendly.
4. Low Cost Do-It-Yourself Desktop Software. One very attractive option we have found is to purchase your own web publishing software, making it possible to build a website without knowing the technical side of things. With “WYSIWYG” editors (What You See Is What You Get), you can see exactly what your site will look like with “drag and drop” customization, and every page has SEO optimization built in. Because you own the software, you also own and control the code, so can move to a new hosting company or edit your site as your needs change. The best one we have found is: Interspire. Their web-publishing platform sells for $395; there are no monthly fees or other charges, it will be installed directly on your server. We would recommend you also select the ($49) add-on option to have it professionally installed on your server; however, before you purchase anything, make sure your webhost complies with the system requirements. The Interspire software comes with 20 website templates (for an additional $79 you can buy a template pack to give you 12 more options if you do not like any of the templates that come in the base price), YouTube embedded support, Twitter integration, Google Analytics integration, lead capture forms, a logo creator and multiple user permissions (to allow you to let other people update or manage your site for you). If you cannot afford to build a traditional site with professional help, we feel adapting one of Interspire’s templates would give you the biggest bang for your buck. We do however, still recommend that you engage a website expert to help you navigate the process.
5. Traditional Websites With Professional Help. There are many website development professionals you can partner with to build an affordable website that you would own and control, completely optimized for SEO, with a good CMS system built in. The cost will vary widely depending upon whom you contract with and what you build. We really hesitate to say what it would cost without knowing what you would want to build, but it is probably safe to assume it could run anywhere from $2,500 to $25,000 ($2,500 for help customizing a template to meet your needs, between $5,000-$25,000 for a basic built site, or much more, if you are looking for ground up design and build with lots of features and functionality (but most drycleaners do not need a Mercedes S-Class, a Ford F150 or Honda Civic will do the job just fine). If you can afford to build a professional website, we do feel it is the best approach overall. Naturally it depends on your business needs and goals, and available resources, but there is no substitute for custom built website design and search engine optimization. Building your own site will put you in complete control and give you the most flexiblity as your website needs evolve over time.
Managing Your Website Once your website is published online, you will want to make sure you manage it effectively. There are a number of aspects to consider.
Make sure your site is registered with local search engines. According to Nielsen, there are now over one billion local searches performed every month. About 80% of online searchers research online and then make their purchase offline close to where they live. Many sites do more than provide an online listing of your store and services, they also allow customers to post reviews about your business. Search engines that include customer reviews provide invaluable information to prospective customers who might be new in town or want to find a new drycleaner. It is word-of-mouth marketing fueled by today’s technology. So whether you just built a new site, or if you have one and have not yet done so, register your site with as many local search engines as you can. It is a great way to grow your business and you don’t have to spend any money to use them. To get your store registered, you have two options: Do it yourself, for free. This will take some time, between one and 13 hours, depending upon how many sites you register on, but it is a good investment of your (or your CSR’s) time. Click here to read a good online article about registering with local search engines. You will find in it embedded links to all the local search engines. Click on each one and input the information you want customers to know about your business. Many of them will allow you to add descriptions of your services and upload pictures of your store. Another option is to spend about $30 and use a automated listing service. These are paid services that allow you to input your information one time and have it automatically “feed” to the majority of the local search sites plus they also feed listings to the major GPS and 411 directories. The best one we have found is Universal Business Listing (UBL), owned by Info USA. Their cost is $30, and the cost of listing with other paid directories like the Yellow Pages, Super Pages, Dex is included. This is a also a good investment, especially when time is limited. It also gives you one place to make updates with in the future. One downside: you cannot handle certain directories in a different way, every directory listing will contain the same information unless you input them by hand first. Whichever way you register, your listing will take time to be activated. How long? Anywhere from 1-2 days to 1-2 months, depending upon the search engine. Also important!! Bing (the new search engine vying to compete with Google) is not currently included in either option above, you will need to register with it separately. To register with Bing, click here. If you are interested in learning more about local search marketing, here is a useful link to a series of articles.
Make sure you have access to your files. Regardless of how you build your website, you need to be able to manage it. Make sure you have everything you need to do this: Original website files, including all photo images, logos, etc used to create it, and backups of all your content, pages and HTML code. This is important if you need to modify your site and want to use a different solution provider. (Note: If you used a free website template, you will not actually own your file code.) Your login information for your website host.
Managing Your Website Other key information to keep on hand: Your domain name host login information. Any additional website login or password information. Make sure your files include login information for your Google account, Yahoo account, YouTube, email marketing, etc.
Keep your site optimized for SEO. The topic of search engine optimization is too big and too important to fit within the scope of this document. We can only scratch the surface of it by stressing the importance of SEO and remind you that investing time and money every year in keeping your site “visible” to search engines and the people who use them is absolutely vital. You should not build a website if you do not believe you can keep it up to date. There are few things you can do upfront to support you in this important task: Install Google Analytics code on your website pages. Many of the templates and any developer can install this free code from Google. It will enable you access to a treasure trove of free analytical tools to assess your traffic and rankings. You will need to register for a free Google account first; if you have someone else install it, make sure they use your log in information so that you can access your website analytics directly. Install Firefox. Firefox is a web browser from Mozilla that has many cool add-on tools to help you with SEO. It is free to download and install. Once you have Firefox installed you will want to install add-ons to help you with SEO. A few good ones are: SeoQuake Seo Toolbar LiveHTTP headers Google Toolbar Web Developer Toolbar YellowPipe Lynx Viewer Tool Rank Checker
Perform SEO check-ups regularly. Once you have a website up and running, make it a point to regularly assess how you are doing. Look at your traffic, keyword performance and other performance trends using Google Analytics. You can identify many of the typical SEO roadblocks, redirects, page-not-found, etc issues using your Web Developer Toolbar.
Be prepared to keep your content fresh. Search engines love fresh content. Plan ahead and determine whom will be your “webmaster” in charge of keeping your website up to date and SEO otpmized.
Managing Your Website My notes:
Web host and login information:
Contacts for web support:
Keyword list:
Managing Your Website Updates to my website:
Where my website files are stored:
SEO checkup stats:
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