Posted on : 07-02-2010 | By : Carol | In : Websites General
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You can get your business online for less than £10 by following these simple steps:
- Register your domain name
Whether your choose your trading name or a name based on your keywords, your first step is to check it’s available then BUY it! Domain names start at around £3 per year and can be purchased from websites such as 123-reg or Heart Internet. There are plenty of other domain name registration companies out there, but these are two that I’ve used personally and can therefore recommend.
- Choose your hosting company
This is the magical part - I’m going to tell you where to find web hosting for an incredibly low price! Pop along to M8 Internet and you’ll find they have packages starting from £1 per year. I’m not affiliated with M8 but I am a happy customer of theirs, which is why I’m happy to recommend them. You can also register your domain through M8 and it sometimes is easier to keep everything in one place but that’s your choice! There are other hosting companies which offer similar packages to M8, but I haven’t found anyone else who offers such good value.
- Set up your website in a few easy clicks
Once M8 (or your chosen web host) have created your hosting package and your domain is fully set up (it can take anything from a few minutes to a couple of days for your domain registration to work its way around the internet!), you’ll be able to login to your website control panel. Scroll down and you’ll see a section called “E-commerce” and below that “CGI Scripts” - these contain several powerful website packages which will give you e-commerce capabilities … and won’t cost you a penny, due do them being “open source”. I won’t tell you which package to choose, but Zen Cart and OsCommerce are very popular. All you need to do is click on your choice of package and follow the simple instructions to have your website up and running in minutes.
Web Accessibility is all about making sure your website is accessible to EVERYONE, including those people with disabilities. This includes visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities.
The Web Accessibility Initiative develops and publishes a list of guidelines in web accessibility that are considered the international standard. You can read the guidelines for yourself at http://www.w3.org/WAI/ along with some more information on why accessibility is important.
If you’ve ever looked into having your own live customer services chat on your website, you may have been off by the price.
I’m pleased to say that I’ve managed to track down an open source Live Help package offered by Crafty Syntax. Crafty Syntax Live Help is packed with features:
- Unlimited operators, departments, and users
- Live Support with visitors on your site in real time
- Proactive chat invites
- Typing Preview to see what is being typed as it is being typed
- Chat Transcripts and Logging
- page and referer Tracking
- Canned Messages
- and more
Click here to visit the Crafty Syntax website and download Live Help for free. You will need to have FTP access to your website and at least one available database in order to set it up. I can do this for you - please see Maintenance, Updates & Fixes.
If you use this software and find it beneficial, I would strongly recommend that you donate to Crafty Syntax.
One of the wonderful features of Wordpress is how easily you can change the look and feel of your website! Well, it’s easy when you know how, I guess …. so here’s a quick tutorial:
- Have a look through the Wordpress themes here and find the theme you like.
- Click the “Download” link next to your chosen theme to download a zip file to your computer.
- Unzip the file so you’re left with a single folder (named after the theme) with its files inside.
- Now, the semi-complicated bit: You need to send a copy of these files by FTP to your website. You’ll need to use an FTP program such as FileZilla (which is free). If you haven’t used FileZilla before, you can download it from here and read the user guide here.
- Once FileZilla is installed, you need to enter your websit’s FTP details, as provided by your hosting company. They’ll look a little something like this
ftp server: ftp.yoursite.com
username: yoursite.com [or a username, such as 'admin']
password:3jh32kkjh3
- Once you hit Connect, you’ll need to find the correct folder. Your website will have a folder structure and you’ll need to click through each folder to find what you need. The main folder is usually called something like “wwwroot” or “public_html“. Within that, you’ll have a folder called wp-content and within that is a folder called themes.
- Once you’ve found that folder, you need to click and drag your NEW theme across into the themes folder.
- Now, go back to Wordpress Admin and click on Appearance > Themes. You’ll find your new theme is available to select - just click on its name, then click Activate.
