STEP 1

Register a Domain Name.
What is a domain name?

Put simply a domain name is the address that people use to find you or your company online; it's what you type in the browser's address bar to go to a specific website.

Domain namemakes your website easier to find and enables you to have professional email addresses, such as, yourname@yourbusiness.co.nz. For example, if you ran a business called Mobile Shop, you would register a domain like mobileshop.com

Choosing a Domain Name

The domain name you chose for your company should ideally be companyname.com this makes sense. In some cases it may also be worth while buying a number of variations of this domain name to ensure you catch all typos. If companyname.com is not available then you may want to look into the legalities of the current owner.

Because of the international nature of the web there is very often not a lot that can be done about this but it is always a good idea to investigate this. If you are unable to secure your business domain try to find something as close as possible.

STEP 2

Set up names@yourbusiness.com email addresses.
Why do I need these?

Bluebird Internet Consulting set up as many email accounts as you require, yournames@yourdomain.com. We don't just provide email addresses, but provide ones protected from annoying spam and viruses.

So what does this all mean?

For example, our business is called Mobileshop- so we have a domain www.mobilshop.com. One email account we have is divya@mobileshop.com We also offer your business aliases, for example, support@mobileshop.com is an alias which forwards to divya@mobileshop.com

So why does my business need these?

• Quite simply it looks far more professional than divya@email.com
• Use your own domain name on your business cards to avoid looking like you've just set-up shop.
• Keep your branding consistent and be in control of your email accounts.

Details on our Spam solution

We've trawled the internet for the best solution to this on-going problem and as a result Bluebird Internet Consulting implements a very thorough system that automatically updates itself with new spam reports to keep you fully protected from the annoyance.

STEP 3

Design a website.
What is website design?

Website Design is essentially the process of sitting down, working out what you require for your website, and then designing the visual and graphical look of the site. Building a website involves two main stages, and website design is the 1st of these.

All other consequent stages of building website will be base upon website design: website structure, web pages appearance, functionality and so on, making it very important website development phase.

What you are left with after web design is one large picture of how your website should look. Turning this picture into a working website is the 2nd stage- web development or website development.

STEP 4

Developing the website.
What is web development?

Web development is the 2nd stage in building a website. It involves taking the visual design and requirements for the website, then, using the most appropriate technologies, converting the design into working website pages.

Bluebird Internet Consulting does not use software programs such as Microsoft FrontPage to build websites as they are inefficient, bulky and do not produce optimized code (hyper text markup language - HTML, XHTML).

Bluebird Internet Consulting writes code by hand so we know that you will receive a top quality website.

STEP 5

Move your website to a web host.
What is web hosting?

What is web hosting? Why do I need it? Well, once you have your website built, you need to put it onto a server on the Internet so that people browsing the Internet can find it.

What problems will I solve by moving website to a web host and what it will cover?

Hosting costs cover the price of the space on the server and for the bandwidth in and out of your website. Bandwidth is the amount of traffic your website receives and thus the amount of data it uses. The more your website is used, and hence the more interest you are attracting, the more bandwidth that is used.

STEP 6

Optimize your website for search engines.
What is search engine optimization?

Bluebird Internet consulting optimizes the websites we build for search engines. What this means is we build your site to appear high up on internet searches, meaning more customers finding your site!

Because Bluebird Internet consulting writes the programming code by hand we know that it is optimised and that the search engines will be able to read your site easily.

Bluebird Internet consulting uses the hyper text markup language tags to correctly markup the content of your pages. This helps the search engines understand which parts of your web pages are headings and which are paragraphs. This helps the search engines rank your pages as they will give priority to the words and phrases in the headings over the content of the paragraphs.

Bluebird Internet consulting will also take keywords that your customers are likely to use in the search engines to find you and put them into some hidden code behind your webpage to further assist the search engines linking people looking for your services to your website.

Search Engine Optimisation Considerations

SEO is not immediate - it takes time for the search engines such as Google to come round and read in your site. When the search engines do come round they will only read in a few pages at a time so it can take months for your entire site to be indexed and searchable.

Because older websites have history and records to verify that people have used them in the past it can be difficult to get a new website ranking highly. However Bluebird Internet consulting uses the latest technologies to provide the search engines with as much information as possible to assist the ranking process.

Putting your keyword in the domain name will greatly assist your ranking for those keywords.

SEO should work behind the scenes and not interfere with the workings of the site

Bluebird Internet consulting also uses Sitemaps to inform the search engine crawlers about all your pages and to help people discover more of your web pages.

STEP 7

Promote your website elsewhere.
How else can I promote my site on-line?

By listing on directories that promote themselves and paying for advertising through Google it is possible to generate immediate, qualified traffic to your website.

The reporting tools that come with these services will also provide you with reports so that you know exactly where your marketing budget is going and where the best results are coming from.

Another important thing that will help you to promote your website is a content management - relevance of information provided on your site, accuracy, positioning of that information, etc.

And, of cause, visual representation - does it catch my eye?

By doing this you can promote you site on-line quite significantly!