Last week in the first part in the “Web Sites for Small Business” series, we discussed why your business needs a web site and the first step to getting online.
If you’ve filled out the Web Site Planning Worksheet, you will have a good idea of what needs to be covered on your web site. The next step is to determine how to get it there.
This week we are going to cover the very basics of what makes up a web site.
There are three main components to having a stand alone web site for your business: a domain name, the files that make up the web pages, and hosting on a server. All three of these components are what people normally refer to when they say that they need to get a web site.
The manner in which a domain, web pages, and hosting work together is similar to renting a box at a mail facility.
Let’s say you work from home and want to have a mailing address other than your home. You go to some place like the UPS Store, or here locally, Mail and More, and rent a mailbox.
You are given a mailing address, and anything that is then sent to that address is placed in your mailbox.
With a web site, the domain name is the equivalent of the mailing address in the above example and the hosting (or server storage) the mailbox.
However rather than people sending mail for you to read, you are leaving file, or web pages, for them in your storage space.
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