Website Planning Overview
Planning a web site includes considering the domain it will use, what web hosting provider is best for your budget, and the site’s structure.
With the domain, it should be easy to type and spell. You don’t want something too similar to another competitor to avoid confusion.
Web hosting provides different quality services depending on what you’re looking for. You tend to get value for money based on the price, so it doesn’t pay to be cheap with web hosting, or your site will load slowly putting off visitors.
You also must choose your site structure to make it easier to navigate.
Some Basic Thing You Should Have Know Before Website Planning
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Web hosting is the service that provides the web servers that host your site, the data center, and staff to manage it, and the multiple high-speed connections to the internet backbone. There are web hosts of every quality and price level. It’s also possible to get access to data centers in the USA, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere depending on where your main customers are located.
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The first type of hosting is shared hosting where up to 1,000 sites are hosted on a single lower powered server. The next level up is a virtual private server which hosted fewer sites and gives partial server control to the client. Cloud hosting splits up the site onto multiple servers to protect from downtime where the site is offline. A dedicated server is where you have a single server with no other clients using it to ensure an uninterrupted service most of the time.
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Domains are registered and used for your web address. Most are dot com (.com), but there’s also .net, .org, and other generic addresses now like .travel and .accountant. It remains to be seen whether the generic addresses will take off or not. An EMD is an exact match domain that matches a popular search keyword. A PMD is a partial match to a search. A branded domain includes a registered brand name. Currently, EMDs, PMDs and brand domains are ill-advised because of various reasons. Google is no longer a fan of EMDs and companies behind brands are likely to sue and demand ownership of the branded domain (and the site) when discovering it.
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The webmaster tool (or Google console as it is now called) is a central control panel for your websites separate to what the web host provides. You’re able to tell Google about the site’s intention and which country you’re targeting. When you’re targeting US customers, then this is set up within the Webmaster Tools. Warnings about bad content quality or suspicious links are often added to an account in Webmaster Tools, so it should be set up for your sites as soon as possible.
