As we all know, computers can be complicated beasts. Those of us lucky enough to have grown up around them have by now a pretty good idea of how they work simply from using them on a day to day basis.  Most of those will have a pretty good idea of how the web and internet works. But even with that computer knowledge, there’s bound to be knowledge that’s needed before you can tackle the challenge of launching an online business.

What is a website?

First off, let’s get into what websites consist of. Forgive me if you already understand this, but I find that it realy helps to understand these basics, it can really help in the long run. A website is basically a series of text documents and images that are located on a server somewhere in the world. It could be anywhere, this really doesn’t matter. Each website has a domain name associated with it. This domain name is the name you type into your web browser, such as www.armchairboss.com. This is basically just an alias to what is known as an IP (Internet Protocol) address. You may have seen these, they are an upto 12 digit address of a server or computer connected to the internet or a network. They might be something like: 192.168.1.1 or 256.174.145.201. When you type a domain name into a browser, your computer contacts a DNS (Domain Name) Server. The DNS server then resolves the name and tells you the IP Address. Your computer then connects with the IP address and downloads the documents to your computer which your browser then interprets and displays on your screen.

So, what are these documents? Web documents take a variety of forms, but most commonly they are made up of HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language). HTML is a series of tags, or instructions, that tell the web browser how to display text displayed on the page. Mark-up languages aren’t that new, they’ve been around in various forms long before the web. A basic example would be something like this: say you need to make a word in a sentence bold. You simply need to surround the word in a tag that instructs the browser to display that word in bold. So the HTML would be:

In this sentence, we need a word to be in <b>bold</b> so people know it's emphasised.

Anything after the initial <b> tag, everything will be in bold until the browser sees an end tag, which takes the form of the inital tag preceeded by a forward slash. So to make something italic, you’d use <i> to start the italics and </i> to end them.

I’m not going to teach you HTML here. It is quite a big language that can take a long time to master. But just knowing the basics is invaluable. Nowadays it isn’t essential that you know HTML as there are many WYSYWIG (What You See Is What You Get) editors out there, that let you design your website pages in a visual manner, rather than with this mark-up language. But you will need to know the very basics, as you may have to post links around or even do small tweaks to an existing site. I would advise everyone to learn the basics of an HTML document, basic styling and linking. For more information, check out W3schools.com for more information on this.

So with all this in mind, for a website you need 3 things: A webhost (server), a domain name and HTML documents. The first two will need to be purchased, for varying prices, and the third can be made by yourself or a professional.

What’s in a Name?

So you need a domain name for your business. It’s important to get this right from the start, once you’ve bought it, you stay with it. Changing domain names can be a pain, so get it right from the start. It’s easiest to sign up for a hosting package and buy the domain at the same time so you don’t have to organise the linking of the domain name to the actual address of your host. There are many hosts out there to choose from, it really is a minefield.

What host you choose can be affected by the type of business you want to build, but there are always things you should take into consideration.

From my experience, ALWAYS choose  host in the US or Canada. You get much more for your money over there. Hosts in Europe tend to be overpriced and under-featured.  I prefer to work with Unix or Linux based hosts. You can go with Windows, but I have found them a pain to work with, Unix is a far superior operating system for a host. I also like one to feature the cPanel control panel, but that’s a personal choice. Try and find one with 24hour technical support too. If you’re based in Europe and your email goes down in the morning, you’ve got a few hours before the Americas wake up, so 24 tech support is essential.

Also it helps to have Fantastico as an option on your host. This is a system that allows the easy installation of various web programs and scripts, such as blogs and shopping carts. This can really make your life so much easier.

My host of choice is Host Papa. These guys are great, and tick all of the above boxes. Plus they run off 100% green energy, so perfect for any treehuggers out there! The sign up procedure is straightforward and you get 1 free domain with your hosting package. It’s competitively priced and best of all, you can host as many websites in the one package as you want.

Enough of all this for today. Next time we’ll look at the specifics of our first business model, running an online shop.