This guide is intended to provide an overview and explain the basics for people who are new to the business of websites.

If as you're reading this, you find you know more than you thought and want to return to our main page, just click one of our frog assistants and she will take you back!

there are basically four things you need to do when you want a website.


1) Get a Web Address

First of all, you need to organise and buy a web address, which is also known as a domain name or url (universal resourse locator).

There are a number of websites and internet servers who will give you a free domain name, as well as free hosting. Free website hosting can be great, but you may find you have limited options as far as the design and content of the pages goes, because you may only be able to use their tools to make your website. You may also have to have their advertising on your site and the domain names themselves are often rather long and can be difficult to remember. Additionally, they do occasionally decide to shut up shop, leaving you with the job of finding another option, and then having to let people know your new website address. Just like changing your postal address it can involve a lot of hassle and time. So, if you're making a site to put up your holiday photos for your family and friends, then by all means get a free one and email everybody the long domain name! If, on the other hand, you want a site for a small business, or an organisation which has a number of members, or you want to impress potential customers, then you will almost always be better off buying your own domain name.

As well as offering more flexibility and reliability, one of the major benefits of buying your own domain name is that, by getting a personalised domain name which is related to your group, business or service, you can make it easy to remember ~ so, when you meet people and tell them the name of your site, they have more chance of remembering the address when they get home, which means they are more likely to visit it and tell other people about it!

It is always worth being flexible about domain names, because many of the really snappy ones have been taken, but there are still a huge number of domain names available, and, of course, you can choose from one of a number of extensions, including .com, .co.uk, .co.nz .net .biz and dozens of other possibilities!

When you sign up for our start-up package, we will offer you more advice about getting a good domain name, check whether particular domain names are available, and, when you find one you like, we will buy it for you and take good care of it until your web pages are ready. We'll also make you a nice temporary home page in the meantime which will tell people that your site is coming and what it will be about!

2. Get a Hosting Package

Once you've decided on your domain name, you'll need a 'host' for your site, which is basically a company that has a 'server' that serves the information on your website to the people who visit. Once you have some web pages (and we'll come to that in a minute!), we will send them to the server (in a process called uploading) and they will then sit on the server, 24 hours a day, and when visitors to your site type your domain name into their computer, the server will send your web pages to their browser.

Again, you can get a free host with your free (but long) domain name if you like, but, as above, this often limits what you can put on your site. Because we run a number of websites, we can multi-buy web hosting in the same way that you can multi-buy 6 or 12 packets of crisps! This means can then offer hosting to our customers much more cheaply than if each customer was to buy their own hosting package for one website.

Our hosting packages start at £6 a month. The cost is dependent on two things. Firstly, the kind of domain name extension you choose: it costs us more to buy and host .com sites than .co.uk sites, for instance, so we have to charge a bit more per month for those. Secondly, because we include free text updates in our hosting packages, you can pick the package that suits your need for updating. In other words, if you only want to update your site two or three times a year, you can pick our bronze hosting package, but if you want us to make text changes more often than that, you can choose a different package to suit your needs. Our start-up package, by the way, covers the first month or two of hosting (depending on how quickly you want your site up and whether we are also doing the design), so you don't even have to start paying this right away!

3. Build Some Web Pages

Now we get to the really exciting bit! There's not much point having a domain name and a hosting package if you don't have anything to put up on the world wide web, so you'll need to make some web pages! The fact that you're reading this means you've probably done some surfing around on the web, and have seen lots of other sites ~ so what would you like yours to look like?! You can send us your text and pictures by email, and we will turn these into html (which stands for hypertext mark-up language and is the language in which web pages are written), add the bells and whistles of your choice and send your pages to the server so that they appear on the web!

The cost of building a web site varies according to lots of things; how many pages you need, how much content each page has, what kind of framework you use to help people navigate around your site, and whether you want pictures and other graphics on the site. Before you sign up, we will be happy to give you a quote for site design. In fact, if you send us an email, we'll send you an free pack which includes lots more information about how to design a site and a form you can fill out and return to us so we can let you know what we would charge for your site. To give you a rough idea of cost, we charge around £250 for a basic site which includes a home page with some text, a few pictures and a navigation bar, and then a couple of other pages with text and a few pictures on each. Additional pages would cost from £30-£50 each, depending on what we're building. If you want a 4 or 5 page site which is mainly text and a couple of pictures here and there, this will obviously cost a lot less then a 10 page site with an integrated shopping cart and lots of graphics.

4. Get your site out there and keep it up-to-date!

Once we have your site up and running, we will give you a word document which includes some of the graphics and text from your site which you can email out to anybody who you think would like to know about or link to your site. We have found that this is a great way of getting visitors to your site, and of making new friends!

Of course, when word gets out about your site, people will want to link to you, and you may want to link back to them, so you will need a way of making changes to the site. Very few sites stay the same forever, and we understand that you will want to make changes and add to your site over time, so we have built the cost of text updates (which includes things like calendars and links) in to our hosting packages where you only pay for what you need. If at some point you decide you want to expand your site by adding more pages, or revamping it completely, just get in touch and we will give you a quote for that. (It is, by the way, a good bit cheaper to have additional pages made using the existing template than to build a site from scratch, so two new pages added to an existing site costs less than the first two pages built for a new site).

Now you've got the basics, please click a frog, leap back to our home page and take a look at our packages!

Or, if you're ready to sign up, email us for a chat! (We love to chat!)

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