Website Development Services
by Sam Hills

Whether you're interested in building a complete e-commerce website or you just need a simple homepage, I can help. If you don't want to get involved in the intricacies of HTML, PHP, CGI, CSS or any of the myriad other details of building a website, I can design and build a complete web site for you.

And if you already have your pages built and all you need is your own domain name, or a place to host your website, I can help you with that too.

Common questions

I want to set up a website. What do I need to do?

First, you need a domain name. This is the name your website will be known as. If you will be selling anything, your domain name should end in .com.

Listed below are several companies that can register your domain name for you.

Next, you need a hosting service to put your website on. Many of the companies that register domain names also provide hosting services. Some even include a free domain registration when you buy hosting from them.

Finally, you will need to build your website and upload it to your host's computer.

If you need help with any of these things, feel free to contact me.

Should I register more than one domain name?

Yes! The more domain names, you register, the better. People often mis-type things (either because they aren't good at spelling, or because they press the wrong keys), and you want these people to find your site too!

It is a good idea to register the other TLDs too. .com is so well-known that many people will only 'remember' the first part of your domain name (the part before the dot) and automatically add '.com' when they type it in. Therefore, having a .com domain is important.

It is a good idea to register the other TLDs too, both to protect your name and to ensure good search-engine ranking. (You don't want someone else's "yourbiz.biz" out-ranking your "yourbiz.com" when someone searches for "yourbiz", do you?) Domain Maniac (listed below) charges $15 per year for most domains. At that price, it's cheap to register your name in all of the TLDs and be sure that no one else can 'steal' it from you.

What kind of hosting should I get?

There are two kinds of hosting, Micro$oft Windows hosting and Unix-based hosting.

Micro$oft Windows hosting offers only one advantage: the ability to run Active Server Pages (asp).

Unless you really need to run .asp, you should stay away from Micro$oft Windows hosting. Because of the need to pay huge licensing fees to Micro$oft, Windows-based hosting is more expensive -- typically $10/month more for the same disk space and bandwidth. Also, some website features aren't available on Windows.

It doesn't matter whether your web host runs Linux or some other flavor of Unix; they all have similar features.

You should also make sure your web host runs the Apache web server. It's generally considered to be the best.