How to Choose Good Domain & Hosting for your Website
Generally speaking, the end result of all of your work on social media, search results, and online ads is to get customers and potential customers to your website. That is because, ideally speaking, your website is where your potential customers can be converted into the real deal and where current customers can find what they are looking for.
If you don’t have a website, we encourage you to use the following steps to help your website be exactly what your customers — both current and future — are looking for. However, we also encourage you to make sure that you are not spending all of your budget on a website that nobody can find. Hold some budget back for marketing your site.
Step 1: Have Good Hosting
When it comes to your site running well, hosting makes all the difference. In
our opinion, some of the best hosting sites are:
• Bluehost*
• Go Daddy*
• HostGator*
• Amazon Web Services
You may be wondering, what does a hosting site do? In short, they keep your website up and running, meaning that your site cannot survive and thrive without them. The hosting platforms mentioned above have different strengths and weaknesses. You need to do some research to
determine which hosting service is right for you. Going back to our event analogy; strong hosting for your website is in direct correlation to the environment, location, and resources of a venue.
Picking a hosting platform with the right resources for your business will set the stage for your website and business in the digital realm. Using a good venue — i.e. hosting service — makes all the difference for your guests. In a business situation, the hosting platform will take care of essentials like file storage, email hosting, server space, databases and more. They provide these types of resources so that you don’t have to provide them yourself. Below we have listed a few key metrics and questions to guide you as you find the right hosting platform for your site.
Basic Metrics to Look For in a Hosting Company:
• An uptime of 99.9% — this means that your website will be up and running on their servers 365 days a year. Anything less can and will be
damaging to the business.
• Unmetered/unlimited bandwidth
• Unmetered/unlimited webspace or disc space
• Quality customer service
• High ratings
Additional Questions to Consider:
• How many domains can you have?
• Do they support e-commerce functionality?
• How much does it cost?
Step 2: Choose an Effective URL
A URL is basically a global address for specific documents, pages, or other resources on the World Wide Web. Put more simply, your URL is what is commonly referred to as your website address and people use it to locate your site. In fact, the word locater is even in the name: URL stands for Uniform Resource Locater. The dynamic marketer URL is Thedynamicmarketer.com — okay, technically our full URL is https://Thedynamicmarketer.com/ but we’re trying to keep this simple.
Following these tips will help you create an effective URL.
Make it Relevant
Your URL should represent either your company name or what visitors will find on your website. It is common practice to use your company name with no spaces followed by a domain name like .com or .org. However, there are times when it makes more sense to have a URL that is related to what you do instead. Either way, your URL should be relevant to your company. If you choose a URL that is not readily associated with your business, you may need to pursue a variety of branding opportunities to connect your web address to your business in people’s minds — making your URL relevant to your company. Believe it or not, there was once a time when nobody know what the URL Google.com was for.
Keep it Short and Simple
There are a lot of good reasons to keep your URL short and simple. Of course, short is relative but you need to make sure that your URL is short and simple enough to be typed without difficulty. Long and/or difficult addresses can cause problems for users and introduce opportunities for typos to land people in the wrong place.
Things to avoid in your URL:
• Words or names that are difficult to spell
• Excessive and/or irregular repetition of letters
• Long strings of words
• Hyphens and underscores
When listing your URL on both physical and digital assets, you may choose to capitalize the beginnings of words to help separate them in people’s minds. For example, if your URL is something like thedynamicmarketer.com*,you may want to think about listing it as TheDynamicMarketer.com*. The capital letters won’t affect people’s ability to get to your site, but it will help separate the words in their minds.
Make it Effective
Your URL will be present in many different locations. In order for it to be effective, you’ll need to think about how your URL will be used on your social media platforms, on other websites, and even on signs and other physical assets. As mentioned above, you may choose to use capital letters to delineate words within your URL. Whatever you decide, however, make sure that you are being consistent in your use. To really be effective, it needs to be both clear and memorable. You should also determine if you will want to pursue your URL as a keyword for search results because this will affect how you use your URL on your site and elsewhere.
Keep the User in Mind
In short, you need to keep the user in mind when creating and branding your URL. When your URL is memorable and easy to type, people are more likely to visit your website directly because strong URLs make it easy for users to get to your site.
Step 3: Build a Strong, Effective Website
As we already mentioned, a strong, effective website should be at the center of your online presence. All of your social media outreach, search engine results and online advertising should be geared toward directing qualified traffic to your site so that you can sell your products or services.
In order to accomplish this, your website needs to be built on a strong foundation — on a strong Content Management System (CMS). Some of the best and most commonly used CMSs are WordPress*, Wix* and Joomla*.
Finding the right CMS for your website is the key to effectively managing your time while still having a great website. Even if you know how to code, manually coding your website can drain a large amount of time and energy that could be directed more effectively elsewhere in your business. One of the main benefits of these CMSs is that they do most of the background coding and programming for you.
If you don’t have any web design or coding experience, we would strongly suggest that you have your website designed by a web design company. However, you’ll want to make sure that they build your site with a CMS that you can learn how to update yourself. You generally don’t want to be responsible for making big changes to your site, but being able to make small updates without working through a third
party can be very beneficial under specific circumstances.
Most hosting services will allow you to connect your website directly to your chosen CMS, but it’s important to make sure that you can use the two together. The whole point of your CMS is to make website creation easier, not more complicatedly elsewhere in your business. One of the main benefits of these CMSs is that they do most of the background
coding and programming for you. If you don’t have any web design or coding experience, we would strongly suggest that you have your website designed by a web design company.
However, you’ll want to make sure that they build your site with a CMS that you can learn how to update yourself. You generally don’t want to be responsible for making big changes to your site, but being able to make small updates without working through a third party can be very beneficial under specific circumstances. Most hosting services will allow you to connect your website directly to your chosen CMS, but it’s important to make sure that you can use the two together. The whole point of your CMS is to make website creation easier, not more complicated
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