The Tools of the Trade: What You Need for Your Website
There’s more to building your website than just buying a domain name and purchasing web hosting. Any good web hosting company will offer you a variety of features to help you in your web-building process, along with links to various partners who may be able to assist with anything they don’t offer.
Website Design
Building your website requires programming, coding, and HTML knowledge…or does it? One of the myths of managing your own website is that you must know how to code and program in order to have a successful online presence. This is not true, as there are a variety of web design software programs out there which can take care of all the technical stuff, while allowing you to enjoy the product.
If you decide that you want someone to handle all this for you or are looking for a professionally designed web presence, be sure to visit the Lunarpages Designer Directory, for a listing of designers we recommend for small to large scale websites and design projects.
Security
Website security is an integral part of a successful web hosting experience. You don’t want to find out that your site’s been hacked, you’ve been billed three times for the same product, that you’re billing your customers three times for the same product, and worst of all, that your web hosting company won’t do a thing about it.
To search for a successful web hosting company, check out the Better Business Bureau’s rating, online hosting reviews, and most importantly, the company’s history. How long have they been in business? How many reviews online are positive and how many are negative? Also, look for customer support forums, which can tell you a lot about what current customers think and how the company treats the good (but more importantly, the bad) replies.
For a secure website, also look for the ability to have a Dedicated IP Address and an SSL certificate. Both of these items are essential to a secure checkout process, and most customers won’t hand you their money without the ability to ensure a safe transmission of sensitive customer data and payments.
Site Administration
No matter if you’re running an online business or just starting a website to share pictures with your family, you need a way to login to manage your account. Some web hosting companies throw a complicated system at you, where logging in is almost harder than getting the website built. At Lunarpages, we offer CPanel, the most user-friendly control panel in the world, which includes a simple Graphical User Interface, perfect for any web hosting newcomer.
We also support a variety of CMS (Content Management Systems), such as Joomla and Mambo, which can be an incredible help in managing your website, the contents within it, and even business information such as client and payment lists.
Communication
Communication makes the difference between just another website and a successful online presence. Today, a website’s viewers expect (and in fact require) interaction between themselves and the company on many levels. The most popular choice for 90 percent of webmasters would be to open up a blog, because it’s easy, functional, and offers your users a glimpse into how the company or the individual running the site thinks and works. A blog can be a great resource for getting traffic as well, as Google and other search engines actively crawl new and frequently-updated blogs. At Lunarpages, we offer a wide variety of blogs, including all the most popular ones, such as Wordpress, B2Evolution, Nucleus, and pMachine Free.
We also offer forums, chatrooms, image galleries, and more, so the tools to communicate are right at your fingertips.
Nuts and Bolts
There are many other things that can jumpstart your website, such as automated catch-all email accounts, picture galleries, help desks, web jukeboxes, streaming video support, etc, and Lunarpages can customize a plan that’s perfect for your needs.
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