This third blog post on the essentials of a website continues to share with you our learnings of developing our website. Do read the first and second post

1.    Website Designers

We are assuming here that while you will provide the content, you will ultimately hire a designer to put all that up for you. Do a profile check before getting any designer on board. Luckily in this case the work of the designer would be up already as part of somebody else’s website. Understand who will be working on your site. You could also share the sitemap with them and tell them that you are looking at them to pitch for your website. This works best if you are corporate client.

Before signing, understand and record the terms and conditions. Ensure that you have written down all that is part of the package as you will surprised how your costs have escalated from where you had started. It would be a good idea to surf several your work related sites. That will give you idea on what different features are available as part of HTML language. You could also give out reference screen shots for specific features that you have liked.

We are starting a series of write ups on what has become one of the most important manifestation’s of a company’s identity – its website. In today’s virtual world, your website has become your visiting card that is up for view 24X7.

Many prospective clients and investors are forming their first impressions about you and your company by that. Just as you would like to look good before meeting anyone, the same applies for your website. We decided to put down our learnings from creating our website and we hope this will help you when you get down to making yours.

1.  Hosting your site

Hosting basically means parking your site on a server. So whenever someone types your site address, that person is taken to that place. So, as the term suggests, your first step would be to buy hosting space for your website.

There are several Indian (Ours was Webwerks) and International vendors available from where you can buy out space. But we have noticed that buying from American vendors directly turns out to be far cheaper. The disadvantage being that you may not get the prompt service levels that your neighbourhood vendor would be able to provide.