1. Site Design.

A professional site should have the following characteristics:

• Visual consistency with the image you want to convey for your business.
• Easy to navigate with a logical page hierarchy.
• Text that has adequate contrast, is easy to read and is written in a manner that appeals to your target demographic.
• Keyword rich content that accurately describes (and defines) your company, your products and the services you offer.
• Persuasive words that compel people to act.
• Strategic use of photography and illustrations to increase awareness and draw attention to important information.
• Educates site visitors about what you offer and why they should do business with you.
• Builds confidence in your business, establishing your brand identity and creating consumer loyalty and trust.
• Saves your time by automating time-consuming tasks like information distribution and data collection.

For information on shaping the visual appearance of your web site, read our web site design guide.

2. Register a domain name.

Choose a name that is:

• Memorable.
• Easy to spell.
• Consistent with your business identity.
  
  
  

Domain name strategies include:

• Using important keywords in the name.
• Buying multiple domain names to target niche markets and forwarding them to the primary web site or a subdomain on the primary web site.
• Buying (and forwarding) common misspellings or variations on the primary domain name.
  
  
  

Start searching for domain names...

3. Obtain a web hosting account.

There are many different kinds of web hosting accounts, including shared hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers. Prices for shared hosting are often as low as $5 per month, while dedicated servers can cost hundreds of dollars a month. For most start-ups and small business, shared hosting plans will be more than adequate.

Look for these features for any commercial shared hosting account:

• The ability to upgrade web space and bandwidth.
• Fast connection speeds.
• FTP access (for uploading pages and files).
• Perl/ CGI-BIN for installing forms, polls, mailing lists and other scripts.
• Uptime of at least 99.5%.
• 24/7 Technical support.
• Email accounts, autoresponders, POP3 and mail forwarding.
• A control panel for administering the back-end of your site.
• Multiple domain hosting and subdomains.
• PHP and MySQL for installing database-driven scripts.
• SSL (secure server) for collecting sensitive data.
• SSH and/or telnet access for testing scripts and maintaining databases.
• Crontabs for scripts that need to run on periodic intervals.
• Good reputation- Google the company to see what kind of reviews it has before making a commitment.

Recommended web host: Downtownhost.com.