WebsiteMate.co.uk

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Technical

Minimum requirements for creating a proper website on the internet:


  • A Domain Name (...click to display detailed explanation)

    A domain name is the website address name that you need to purchase (or more specifically register) in order to have a recognised address 'place' on the internet. Using a conventional retail analogy, you could view a domain name as a bit like the need to purchase (or register) a shop name like 'Jo's Fruity Flowers'.

    However, the difference between a domain name and a shop name, is that a domain name must follow specific conventions (or protocols), for example, certain characters cannot be used (like an 'apostrophe' etc) and the name must also end in a specific style, for example .co.uk or .com etc (which often signifies the country of origin - although not always!)

    These names can be registered (rented) for a period of time (often circa 2yrs) and depending on whether you opt for a .co.uk or .com ending, can cost anything from about £9.00 to £50.00 (for a 2 year period).

    At WebsiteMate.co.uk we are more than happy for you to register your own domain name (although if you choose to do this, you will obviously have to deal with any settings and configurations yourself) or for a modest fee, we can register the name on your behalf and deal with the configuration.

    Ok - we now have a name registered....what next?



  • A Hosting Space (...click to display detailed explanation)

    A hosting space can be seen as 'renting the shop premises' (using the retail analogy previously mentioned).

    This can, to be honest, be a bit of a minefield. Your hosting really does depend on what your website is designed to do, how many people you expect to visit (traffic volume etc) and what kind of absolute guaranteed 'uptime' reliability you need - it is worth noting that even a service offering a 99% uptime guarantee, could still be a 1% downtime (which can equate to 3 days of a website outage, in any one year). That said, this may never happen, and may not be a huge issue to a smaller company anyway. Indeed very much like a shop - is this a corner shop or a supermarket?

    If your website needs a database (as a backend) then your hosting costs will be more than if it doesn't. Websites that have specific user logons or products to sell etc, will almost certainly require a database. To give you an idea, this website (WebsiteMate.co.uk) requires no database, and as such has no database hosting requirement.

    Again, as with the domain name, WebsiteMate.co.uk are more than happy for you to secure your own hosting if you prefer, although it is worth mentioning that we have negotiated some rather favourable hosting services on behalf of clients and in many cases, our websites are being hosted for £20.00 per year - indeed in some circumstances, we can even secure free hosting for you, although it must be noted that the type of website you can use on these 'free' hosts is rather limited. Equally, we can also offer serious 'Rolls Royce' hosting where required (using the likes of Rackspace etc).

    Ok - we now have our hosting....what next?



  • A Website Design (...click to display detailed explanation)

    Well now we come down to the main area that most people see - the actual website. So to continue with the retail analogy, the website is really like your shop design, the shop window etc.

    Websites are basically programs, written in a language that can be interpreted and thus displayed, by web browsers (for example Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Chrome etc). Whilst these browsers are 'supposed' to follow the same set of rules for reading and interpreting websites, the reality is that they don't. All website developers with have 'tales of woe' about getting their websites to work on different internet browsers - indeed, it is probably fair to say that this is the single largest problem of web development.

    You can design and write websites in many different programs and all the main internet 'players' have their own development solutions which you can use. At WebsiteMate.co.uk we primarily use a Microsoft platform called ASP.net; this is an extremely powerful website development language. In addition to ASP.net, we also use a lot of JavaScript (more specifically jQuery) - which is what allows for the slightly more 'funky' screen effects and validation for email forms etc.

    There are definite standards and protocols which really need to be adhered to when designing websites, and these are often changing at quite a fast pace as new technologies come along. There are also choices of which 'media' packages to use for displaying slideshows or streaming movies from your website - for example, do you use Microsoft Silverlight or Adobe Flash (both have their own advantages and disadvantages)?

    There are also an increasing number of website interactions (or mash-ups) which you can build into your website. For example, you can have Twitter feeds coming directly into you website, or facebook interactions or flickr photographs automatically being displayed in your website.

    You also have the ever complex world of getting your site listed and indexed with search engines like Google. At WebsiteMate.co.uk we are constantly updating our knowledge on the ever changing rules and suggestions on search engine optimization (or SEO as it is known) - and yes they do change! We are very confident in writing websites that adhere to these rules and thus 'index' very well in Google etc.

    Finally, your website need to be technically quick and efficient as well as pleasing and informative - again there are different solutions for 'speeding-up' websites ensuring that you still have the 'look' without it dragging to a standstill!

    At WebsiteMate.co.uk, we pride ourselves on not only getting the look and style right, but also making sure that the website is optimized - indeed you could say that we really care about what is 'under the hood' as well!



At WebsiteMate.co.uk we primarily develop websites in a 'server side' language called ASP.net (c#) alongside another 'client side' language called JavaScript. There are many different technologies involved with website development and below we have created a 'tag-cloud' which lists web technologies by name, which once clicked on, will automatically perform a look-up on the social bookmarking site 'delicious'.



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