Information and Services by Zac Hester

Starting a Commercial Web Site

Introduction

Starting a web site from scratch can be an overwhelming task for even the most computer savvy--let alone dealing with the intricacies of ensuring your web site will be a successful component of your business. This article is intended to provide a lot of upfront information you need to know to oversee the development of a web site for your business. The intended audience is business owners and managers, but you may find this information useful if you already work in the field of web development.

The article is divided into the following sections:

Finding and Hiring a Web Developer

An early decision that can make your experience and your web site better is finding a good web developer. This is no small task and shouldn't be taken lightly as it will affect every aspect of how your site performs, how well it represents your business, how well it functions for your visitors, how well it places in search results, and how well it meets your requirements. Additionally, a good web developer can help you through many of the aspects I discuss later in this article. More simply, starting with a good web developer will make your life a lot easier.

What qualifies a web developer as "good?"

Unfortunately, there are many aspects to consider and some will be more or less important depending on your situation. Below is a list of qualities and how you can examine those qualities in a potential contractor.

Capabilities

Perhaps the most important aspect in most projects is a web developer's capabilities. What are they able to do? An easy way to find out is to ask for a portfolio or a list of links to other sites they have built. Most development companies keep a "clients page" on their site that you can use to view their existing work. Initially, it's easy to evaluate their graphics and design abilities by seeing how good their pages look. But, be careful about aesthetics. Commercial web sites are just like a book: looks can be deceiving. Some may look great, but offer very limited services to its visitors.

While you're looking at the visual aspects of their work, look for grammatical problems that exist in the design (elements that exist on every page). The content of most sites is controlled by the owners of the site and not necessarily passed through the developers, so don't look at the bulk of the information for grammar/spelling mistakes. If you notice incorrect language (word usage is a miserably abundant problem on the web) in major headings, graphical banners, or primary links, you know you are dealing with either sloppy or ignorant web developers. Also, be wary of developers that like to use a lot of jargon and abbreviations in their documentation. Many companies like to throw buzzwords at potential clients in an attempt to prove that they have been in the industry for a long time or they are somehow more qualified than a developer who uses plain language to express technical ideas. (I, briefly, worked for one such company.)

After you see the quality of their visual work, make sure their sites all function well. If they are confusing to navigate or certain features don't work very intuitively, you're going to get the same results on your site if you hire them.

If you want a site that is more than just a pretty design, you should also ask to see examples of their web site management tools. Most developers use off-the-shelf software to help people manage their sites easier and many develop their own tools. Make sure you know what kind of tools you will be working with. If you are spending a lot of money on your site, you can often have the tools custom built, so this may not be a very important issue for some projects.

Finally, if you intend to conduct commerce through your web site (you wish to collect sensitive information from your customers), you will want to hire a developer that has experience with secure servers and secure applications. Since this aspect of your site can open you to financial and legal problems, it is absolutely critical that your web developer understand all the implications of a secure site. Just make sure they've done it more than once or twice in the past and that they are familiar with the standards and protocols used in "SSL" (Secure Socket Layer) (more on this later).

Use of Technology

For the most part, you won't care about the technology used to drive your web site. As long as everything is fast, reliable, secure, and accurate, the web site should perform its job regardless of what technologies are used. There are, however, a few things that you can find out about a web developer's use of technology that can make big differences over time. The following are a few questions you should ask and the types of responses you should expect.

Timeliness

Another issue that is important to consider is that you find a web developer that can set and make deadlines. This is perhaps one of the most challenging aspects for a developer and those that are able to make deadlines and turn around their work quickly are usually the ones with more experience with web development. Running into obstacles during development can be a problem for some developers, but time management is an important aspect of design and programming that is surprisingly lacking in this field (occasionally, even I miss deadlines for stupid reasons).

It's hard to asses this quality without previous experience with a developer. If you think this is a significant factor for your site, you may want to contact other clients for whom the developer has worked and ask them how they would rate this developer's ability to meet deadlines.

Communication

Typically, your web developer will also become your web consultant as you continue to work with the developer over time. You want to make sure that your developer possesses strong communication abilities and is able to translate all the technical language into simple terms that help you make decisions based on your business' strategy and not "why" something has to work a certain way.

This is usually easy to evaluate based on meetings, phone calls, emails and any other correspondence. Make sure you feel comfortable talking about your business with them, and that you don't feel overwhelmed because you don't know as much about the web as they do. If you feel that they are speaking a different language, you don't have to accept that level of communication. Good developers are also good communicators.

Attention to Detail

Web development is a craft just like building a house, painting a picture, or designing clothing. Those who take their craft seriously should pay close attention to everything they do. If their writing ability is poor, or they forget to proofread their documents, those are signs that they feel that detail is unimportant.

Your Developer

Once you're satisfied you've found a good web developer, most of the following items in this article are usually handled by them. If you are working with someone with a lot of experience on the web, they should know how to handle the following aspects and help you through the confusing parts. However, you will have a big advantage if you are, at least, familiar with the following concepts. For long-term success of your site, you should pay special attention to understanding the section about search engines.

Choosing and Registering a Domain Name

There are many aspects of choosing a domain name. You can read a little about the technical details in another article I wrote about the web. Simply put, you should try to make your domain as simple as possible. You should also strive to choose a domain that is easy to communicate both verbally and literally. You should also consider that you want a domain that is timeless and doesn't miscommunicate something about what your business does now and what it might do in the future. For example, if you choose a domain like "superpetfood.com," and your business later branches out to pet grooming services, your domain is no longer completely appropriate for your business.

After you have a few candidate domain names, you should check to see if they are available. Any domain registration web site will help you and a web site like Whois.net is specifically designed to help you search for currently-registered domains. Unfortunately, this will usually eliminate your favorite choices.

Registration

Usually, you will want to have your web developer help you register your domain name. However, you can do this part yourself and possibly save some money. The big name in domain registration is Network Solutions, but there are many worthwhile companies that can save you a little more money. A lot of people have good results with GoDaddy (they're probably the least expensive). Either way, the process of registering a domain is usually the same. All you have to do is visit their site and sign up for services online. Make sure you write down your registration information so you know how to log back into your domain registrar's web site to make changes in the future.

I should also point out that there is no problem with registering multiple domain names for the same web site (this is pretty common). Once you see how cheap the registration costs are, it usually makes sense to provide a few domain names which can improve your web site's reach.

Finding and Purchasing Web Hosting

Again, your web developer should be able to help with this aspect of your site. Additionally, who you hire may also limit what hosting providers will be most appropriate for your site. However, I can provide some guidelines and offer a few suggestions with companies I have used in the past.

When I work with a client to find and provision hosting for them, I follow a set of guidelines and standards that ensures their site will not be limited by the technology on which it is hosted. I have a very detailed list of the technologies I recommend and use every day.

You should understand that there are two major varieties of web hosting: local and national. There are advantages and disadvantages of both. For example, local providers (even large companies) tend to cost more and offer a lower standard of reliability and redundancy. National providers are almost always cheaper and provide a much more reliable service (they're competing on a global scale), but will occasionally not be able to provide the same quality of customer support a local company can provide. Therefore, if you decide to pay the premium price for a local provider make sure they provide exceptional customer support. Otherwise, you're paying a lot of money for no reason and receiving inferior service.

Personally, I've done business with about ten different web hosting providers over the years (both local and national). I've also operated the web hosting services for a local Internet service provider and continue to provide web hosting services on a limited scale to non-profit organizations. In my experience, I have found two hosting providers that have met and exceeded my expectations.

Proper Hosting is a company that not only operates some of the most reliable and secure web servers available, but they have outstanding tech support. There is always a knowledgeable and friendly person on the other end of the phone. They also offer one the best ranges of hosting options for outstanding prices. Their basic $5/month package gives you the same features a $50 to $75 per month package has from some local providers. They also have more advanced and practically unlimited hosting packages that can handle large-scale, commercial web sites with no problems.

NeralyFreeSpeech is a newer company with a business model that will likely be mirrored by other companies in the years to come. While their servers are just as reliable and secure as Proper Hosting, their only negative is that they lack telephone-based customer support. Even then, they still provide a high level of customer support over email. The payoff with their service is that you can host a web site on very high-end servers that are distributed across the country for as little as a fraction of one cent per month. They charge based only on how much you use. Thus, as your site starts out, it will be very inexpensive to host. As your site becomes more popular (and hopefully makes more money), the cost will increase. Even then, most sites on their service will still not cost more than other providers with flat monthly charges.

Search Engine Placement

A common problem for web site managers is how to get more traffic to their site through search engines. It's clear that placing well in search listings will improve your site's reach and hopefully provide more direct results for your business. The question I get asked all the time is how to get a site to rank higher in search engines.

First, I need to qualify that most of my knowledge is based on the well-published technologies behind the Google search engine. And, since Google powers most of the popular search sites (YaHoo, AOL, etc), we can cover a lot of territory by paying attention to how Google works and not worry so much about the other search engines. (Indeed, most other search engines are just trying to emulate Google's capabilities, anyway.)

Google engineers have developed the concept of "page rank." Determining page rank is a very complex process of statistical evaluation of many factors. Page rank is sort of like a numerical rating (say, a number between one and ten) of how applicable the content for a particular page is for a given key word. The mysterious quantity that is a major focus of Google's ongoing research is how to measure just how applicable content is for a key word.

A Little History

In the past, many search engines relied on subtle "tricks" web developers could use to try to highlight or flag their web site for certain key words and phrases. Initially, this sounds like a good idea. However, there is nothing stopping a web developer from creating pages with completely senseless content and try to indicate that the page is appropriate to an unrelated key word. Basically, we now have to take the stance that web developers can not be trusted to accurately and appropriately describe their own pages.

Another idea is to ask people to review the content for a web site and determine if it is applicable to a particular key word. Needless to say, the web has enough content to keep an army of people busy for a very long time. Even then, there is a project that is trying to create a human-reviewed listing of sites on the web. This organization is called DMOZ and is a good starting place to try to help get your site listed with the major search engines. However, web developers need to pay special attention to their guidelines as simple mistakes can cause a web site to get blacklisted from the listing rather than indexed for search engines. And, because the listings are enormous and all the sites have to be reviewed by people, the time it takes for a site to get reviewed can be anywhere from months to years. Even then, DMOZ can't guarantee that you'll be ranked any better than another web site. It's just a possible first step in the process to being ranked in the first place.

Taking the idea that people know how applicable a web site is, Google's page rank uses people to rate web sites in a different way. Instead of using a relatively small group of volunteers to review web sites, Google "listens" to people on the web by seeing where people link from their own sites. For instance, if I write an article on my site about giraffes, and I link to three other sites with information about giraffes, Google is able to see the common information between the sites. Even better, if another web site about giraffes links to my article about giraffes, it will see that my article is important to other people interested in giraffes. As you can see, it doesn't take very many web sites linking to each other to create an amazingly complex web of content relationships. This is where a herd of mathematicians comes in handy, and Google employs such a herd.

Drawing Conclusions

So, what does all this mean? How can we make sure our site is appropriately ranked?

First of all, this means that we can't try to artificially manipulate the search engines into thinking our site is applicable to a particular key word or phrase. Second, our site not only has to be applicable to those key words, but we have to convince other people that our site is great. Specifically, we have to convince other web site managers who have content that is similar to our own to create links from their content to our content. For the most part, web sites don't become popular because we get on the phone and call all the people we know with a web site. The majority of sites become popular because hundreds and even thousands of other sites create links to the site in question.

The explosion of blogs has become a driving force in helping to make many web sites popular since the average person can drop a well-targeted link to another page from a page with information about that person's opinions on the same subject.

Now, I'll point out the implications this has on the strategy of our site. Primarily, it means that we need to provide information on our site that has real meaning to other people. This seems like an obvious statement, but you'd be surprised at how often this simple concept is overlooked.

Ask yourself these questions: Why would another person be compelled to create a link to my site? What resources do I offer that is unique to my situation and/or valuable to a wide range of people?

Usually, this comes down to the problem of generating large volumes of content. For those of you that didn't like writing five-page term papers in college, this is going to be an uphill battle. Also, there are other strategies to generating large amounts of content. For example, web-based message boards or forums create an environment where anyone on the web can create content for your site.

Additionally, this content is critical for search engines when they "read" your web site. If there isn't a lot of textual information for search software to read, how will it know what your site is about?

Helping Search Engines Help Us

Let's pretend that 1000 web pages with information about giraffes are now linking to our article about giraffes. At this point, special software applications called "spiders" or "crawlers" will begin reading our article. They analyze how many times certain words appear in the document, if the words are in headings (large, bold phrases that separate sections of a document), if the words themselves are linked to other pages (and the information on those pages), and a dozen other factors.

This brings us to a few things that we can actively do to help the search engines when they decide to read our pages. For the most part, these are boring things best left to technical people, who will be working with the "guts" of the site. However, knowledge of these elements can help you ask your developer to make sure these things are in place.

Furthermore, search engines enjoy working with documents with high-quality markup rather than documents that are built carelessly or those built using WYSIWYG editors (which produce horrible markup). For more information about creating great documents, see my articles about web document markup and web document structure.

The Search is On

Once all of the foundation is in place and we continue to develop content and provide more information, it's a matter of time before our site is indexed by search engines. It's not uncommon to wait up to a year before a site is indexed. I've also seen a page get indexed inside of a week due to extraordinary popularity. Again, it all comes down to how valuable our site is to other people.

Conclusion

This document is intended to provide you with the information necessary to start a strong, commercial web site without incurring problems down the road. It should be apparent that a critical step is choosing a good web developer to help guide you through the confusing parts. After that, the other aspects should fall in place as a natural progression of a high-quality site. However, it never hurts to have a head start on that knowledge.

If you read this article and would like to find out more, don't hesitate to contact me. My consulting rates are very reasonable and scale according to your business and your needs. Feel free to send me an email any time.

Bibliography

coming soon

Last Modified: March 15, 2006