Continues from part 2 – Choosing a hosting company

Part 3 – Design a cool website

In order to design a cool website you don’t have to be a web designer. Nowadays there are quite a few ways to get a simple website online in just minutes with website platforms like Blogspot, Wordpress, Joomla and many many more.

Blogspot and Wordpress are the most popular website/blogs platform because they are free of charge. You need to download a software (CMS) that allows you to manage the website, for instance, to write posts, publish pictures, videos, banners, flash movies, etc, etc.

For each website platform there are skins or designs or mostly called themes. Many of them are free and can easily be found by searching for example “wordpress free themes”. However, sometimes you can’t find something really nice with a professional look so design companies offer a wide range of awesome themes. Of course you have pay from US$50 until around $100 to get a very professional looking theme. They are easy to use and very customizable. To give you a few companies, check these ones out: Revolution Two, Woo Themes, iThemes, etc.

iStudyatHES.com uses a Gazette Edition Theme by Woo Themes. For a really accessible price we own the theme and we can modify the design as we want. Very good customer services and continues updates to maintain a smooth functioning of the website.

Sometimes coding problems may arise but if you are patient and try to look for answers on the net or forums, you’ll find the way around but be warned! You may get a bit crazy with it! At least I got stressed a few times. Once you learn it, it is very useful for many things.

Now that you built the website, you need to make it popular to the world but how? well, that’s a bit tricky but with advices of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) you can start to rank high in Google. Read how to do it in part 4. (soon online)

Popularity: 14% [?]

Continues from part 1 – Getting a domain name

Part 2 – Hosting company

A hosting company sells space in the world wide web. They also known as servers that are computers with lots of memory where the websites are archived. These “servers” are online all the time and if for some reason they go offline, your website goes offline as well. This is why a hosting company is really important.

How do you choose a good hosting company?

There are a few factors that you need to be taken under consideration.

1. Uptime: This is the porcentage of time that the server is online. It will never be 100% but at least 99%. For example 96% is bad because it means that your site will be offline at least one day per month.
2. Price! Yeah, some companies make hosting really cheap but they are likely to go offline more often. Paying US$ 7 or 8 per months would be reasonable good. Remember that depending the price you get more stuff like unlimited space, email addresses, etc.
3. Costumer service: Try to be sure how the company is going to help you and to what extend in case of technical problems. In general is by email through tickets but see if they offer a phone line and also if they won any certificates in best customer service or help support.
4. Technical stuff: If you know a bit, make sure that the hosting is able to support your databases and coding stuff like PHP, mySQL, PHPmyadmin, AJAX, etc.
5. Read reviews! There are plenty of websites that provide reviews of the different kind of hosting companies. Just google the name of the company + reviews.

iStudyatHES.com was hosted first in a really cheap company called Dattatec (real bad but cheap) and we paid US$ 10 for the whole year (incredible cheap) but after 3 months we realized that the uptime was really bad since the website was down for a few hours almost every week and sometimes like 2 days. Therefore we decided to move to BlueHost which offers a pretty high uptime and unlimited space and like 2500 email addresses. We made a contract for 2 years for US$6,95 per month (around €5) and so far the website has been never offline and loads quite fast.

If you are planning in purchase a Bluehost deal, please use our links!

NEXT Part 3 – Design a cool website

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Nowadays making a website is not that difficult as before. Everyone can do it with just a bit of effort and of course, you gotta be smart and have plenty of time and pantience. In a couple of posts we will tell you how this website is done and what are the tricks to keep it simple but good looking.

First of all you need to know the basics. In order to have a website you need a domain name, a hosting company, a cool webpage and SEO (search engine optimization, so ppl can find you easily in Google). How to get these things and how to make your website look professional will be explained in the next couple of posts. Read on!

1. DOMAIN NAME

This domain name will be your identity in the web. Don’t make it difficult, make it nice and simple so ppl can remember it easily. Ah! you have to pay for this, normally it’s US$10 for dot com or like €6 to €8 for european extentions (.nl .es . fr .eu etc). These prices are per year.

The domain name could be purchased in any company. Some of them help you out to choose a domain name since sometimes the name you might choose it’s already taken. The best websites to get domain names are: Godaddy.com, One.com and we recommend Bluehost.com where we bought ours.

Parked domains

Parked domains are extra domains that redirect to the same website. For example you can access istudyathes.COM when you type istudyathes.NL. Both addresses take you to the same webpage. You can add as many as you want, .NET, .ORG, .INFO, etc.

NEXT in Part 2= Choosing a hosting company

Popularity: 36% [?]