More Irish business owners understand the importance of getting their businesses online, but many are unsure at how much it costs to have a website designed and the annual costs involved? It really can be difficult to gauge just how much you should spend and quotes from companies can vary wildly.

So, let’s take look at the basic costs of starting your very own website and what’s involved.

How much you spend is largely up to you. You could easily spend thousands of euro on ‘bells and whistles’ that you really don’t need. To ensure you’re not paying too much for your website try to first educate yourself about what you really need from your website provider. The following guide will help.

To get started, every website needs a domain name and a web host.

Register A Domain

A domain name (also known as ‘URL’ or ‘website address’) is simply the name you want to give your website. For example, MSN’s domain is msn.com. To get a domain name of your own you have to pay an annual fee to a registrar. This gives you the right to use that name for your website. Prices vary from one registrar to another and for different types of domain (.com, .eu, .co.uk, .ie etc.) but you can usually expect to pay between Euro10 and Euro30 for a domain.

Web Hosting

Now that you have your domain you need to host your website and point your domain toward it. Hosting servers are connected to the Internet making your website available for the world to see. Think of your web host as your landlord, but instead of renting an apartment you’re renting space on their server. This hosting space is where your website is housed and your domain is a signpost to direct people to your site.

Building Your Website

It’s Never Been A Better Time To Get Online

As far as actually building your site and adding content, there are plenty of options, from free website builders (provided with some hosting services) to building a site from scratch yourself to using the services of a professional web designer. Professional websites can be expensive; however there are companies in Ireland that provide excellent services a low cost, tailored in particular for small businesses.

Starter Websites a Kerry Web Design service and a leading low-cost website provider in Ireland. Each website has custom design features, is built to recognised industry standards and rigorously tested in multiple browsers to ensure it displays correctly. All Starter Websites come as a complete web package that includes a free .com domain for 12 months, free hosting for 6 months as well as other bonuses (such as SEO) and regular special offers.

What You Need To Do Now

It’s always a good idea to shop around before making your choice of web designer and finding a designer you are happy to work with is equally important. Getting your business online is made easy by website design providers like Starter Websites. All you need to do is provide text about your business, detail your services and provide contact information and the name you would like for your website. Starter Websites will typically have your new website live within 5 to 10 working days, usually for as little as Euro395.

Conclusion

The cost of getting a professional website need not break your promotion budget, and your website will add value to your business, enabling prospects to visit your site and learn about your services 365 days a year. So don’t put if off any longer, get you business online starting today.

OKay, gotta’ tell you about this handy little plug-in for WordPress. Excellent for those customizing WordPress sites.

Let’s say you want to add a new page but DON’T want it to show up in your navigation list.

You can download this WordPress plug-in, upload it, activate it and then exclude pages just by unchecking a check box in the page edit section for any page.

It’s real easy to use and takes seconds to set-up.

Get it here: Exclude Pages In WordPress.

Enjoy!

Follow Me On Twitter

Okay, this is as much for my future reference as it is for you right now.

I’ve been looking for this solution to listing sub-pages navigation on both the parent and all the child pages. Anyway, don’t know how I missed it but it was right there at the bottom of ‘Template Tags/wp list pages’ all along (I assume).

Here’s the extract from that page. Enjoy and good luck with your WordPress customization!

Want A Free Alternative to PhotoShop?

Of course you do!

Check out the open source alternative to PhotoShop, Gimp.

This is a powerful image editor and graphics tool that is free to use. It has pretty much the same tools as PhotoShop but the price is better!

Check out the site, download Gimp and enjoy.

Go get it! Visit the GIMP website.

Find me on Twitter!

Website Year Automatic Update With PHP Code

To update your website year information automaticlly (usually in the site footer) add the following php code to the footer:

<?php
ini_set(‘date.timezone’, ‘Europe/Dublin’);
$startYear = 2006;
$thisYear = date(‘Y’);
if ($startYear == $thisYear) {
echo $startYear;
}
else {
echo “{$startYear}-{$thisYear}”;
}
?>

Save, upload and view. Simple.

Remember to change ‘$startYear = 2007′ to the year your site went live. Also, when adding PHP code your webpage must be a PHP page.

Important note: If you copy and paste the PHP code into an editor (like Dreamweaver) you may need to replace the commas etc. For some reason they don’t ready properly sometimes. Beats me!

Will I Get Google Juice From Twitter?

A friend recently asked me “Will I get Google juice from Twitter?”

Good questions. Here’s my thoughts…

Twitter For Juice And Traffic

I think tweeting your own new pages helps with Google indexing of those pages.

If you have enough twitter followers you’re bound to pick up traffic too and the Google juice will probably increase accordingly.

The more twitter friends you make the more people will automaticlly follow you. Most people like to be nice.

And the more people that follow you the higher the potential traffic you might be able to extract from your twitter network.

If you’re looking for twitter traffic to increase Google juice, getting lots of twitter friends might be the best thing to do.

Twitter For Research

If you’re following people you want to learn from keep your twitter friend list short. If you’re using twitbin you can only see so many twits at a time so choose your guru carefully.

Using twitter this way will keep you up-to-date with industry news that you’re interested in.

You’ll also get plenty of inspiration for blog posts – if that’s something that you do.

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The New Internet Your Way

What if you could start the Internet again?

What would you keep/leave out?…

Join Me.

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Header Tags, Bold Text and SEO

I’m instructing a client’s staff on basic SEO and find it best to explain the process as we go. This is an extract from a note I sent regarding the use of ‘H’ tags and bold, italic and underline text. HTH!

…HTML tags are important from and SEO perspective as it marks heading text out as a kind of brief summary of the content that follows it.

By using HTML header tags you are saying my page is about this, this and this. The search bots then check the following text to see how it actually relates to the heading.

That’s why we bold, italic or underline the important text in the content. It makes it stand out to search bots as important and if relevant to the subject (usually mentioned in the header tag) they will index it for related searches.

Be Careful About Underlining.

People have come to recongise underlined text as links. If they click underlined text and it’s not a link they become confused about what is and is not a link on your page.

People don’t wait around on the Internet. If they have to think question what they already know there’s a good chance they will exit the site and not return.

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Free Web Background Pattern Creator

I’ve gone to the trouble of making my own background stripes for web pages and know all the hassle that comes with it.

Lining everything up, tweaking till it matches on all sides, tweaking again…

What a waste of time!

Check out this free website background pattern creator called Stripe Generator

It takes the pain out of background patterns and is simple to use.

Enjoy!

P.s.

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Submit Your Web Site To 20 Free Links Directories

The following are a list of 20 free link directories that you can submit your website links to. They are all high page ranked (two are PR 6, about four are PR 4, the rest are PR 5).

• http://www.clarib.com/
• http://www.info-listings.com
• http://www.searchsite.com
• http://www.forage.in
• http://www.dramba.com
• http://directory.portalit.net/index.php
• http://www.betterwebdirectory.com
• http://www.e-sygoing.com
• http://www.linkcenter.com
• http://www.amray.com
• http:///www.free-top.net/dir/
• http://www.freewebsitedirectory.com
• http://www.gmdir.com/index.php
• http://www.illumirate.com
• http://www.jamjaa.com
• http://www.linkspub.com/
• http://www.bahiacar.com
• http://www.directoryvault.com
• http://www.find.directorio-madrid.com
• http://www.freeadvertisingdirectory.com/suggest-link.php?id=0

Some Link Directory Submission Tips

Don’t over do it with keywords stuffing or your submission will be rejected.

Remember to select the correct link category, the one nearest related to your web site subject.

There is usually an option to submit for a FREE link with NO reciprocal links. If you only have the option to submit for a paid link or in exchange for a reciprocal link you might want to just move on the the next site.

It’s up to you.

More Link Building Strategy

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