Project Fridays: Domains and Web Hosts

August 29th, 2008 Posted in Website Management

Gears

This is the second part in our on-going series, Project Fridays, where we guide you through on how to run and manage your own niche portal. We also use this opportunity to discuss our niche portal projects, and use them as examples throughout. Last week we discussed web portals in general and how to begin choosing a topic for your own niche portal. This week we will begin to cover getting your portal up and running.

Quick, Easy, and Professional Looking

At the beginning of your project you want to keep costs low, as generating income from a niche website is very slow at first. Usually this means you do it yourself, or you try to hire someone else that has reasonable prices (Tip: if hiring someone else on a tight budget, be specific on what you want from the web designer). This series of blog posts is assuming you have chosen to do everything yourself. However, if you want someone else to do it, hire us!

There are three steps to getting up and running:

Securing a domain name and web host.
Installing a Content Management System (CMS).
Designing your website’s look appropriately.

This week we will cover the first step and the other two will be covered the following weeks.

Securing a Domain Name and Web Host

You need a domain name and a web host! Your domain name is what people type in their browser to get to your website, and a web host is who stores your website for people to see on the Internet. Both choices are critical to your project, as they will usually remain the same for the lifetime of the website.

Choosing a Domain Name:

Your domain name is critical to the success of your website, as many things rely upon your decision. Your domain name can contribute heavily to your website’s overall ranking ability for keywords on search engines, and your visitor’s ability to remember it in order to tell friends and re-visit. When choosing a domain name, you need to take both of these important factors into account. It should be easy to type in and remember, while utilizing a major keyword for your niche. But how do you know what keywords are most popular in your niche?

If you are an expert on your chosen niche, you can probably already guess what people are typing in to find related content. However, whether you are an expert or a layman on your chosen topic, you need to do some basic keyword research. You can get a good view on how people are searching your topic by using Google’s Keyword Research Tool.

Google’s Keyword Research Tool will grant you access to keywords that people are searching in relation to the keywords you give the tool. For example, running “global warming” will produce keywords related to the main topic “global warming”. The keyword, “global warming effect” comes up second in overall average search volume for the past 12 months. So if you were aiming to build a niche portal on global warming, a good domain name might be www.theglobalwarmingeffect.com. This domain meets both important aspects of a good domain name:

It has a major keyword in it.
It is easy to remember and type in.

Spend some time developing domain name ideas. In general, the shorter the domain name - the better. I suggest searching and purchasing domain names from Godaddy.com. They have great domain name management tools, and their prices are reasonable at $9.99 a domain.

Our Portal: StarCraftZine.com

When choosing a domain name for our project niche portal, we knew we wanted something short and sweet. The domain name also had to connect with the idea that it was an online magazine for our main topic, StarCraft. So we very quickly decided on www.StarCraftZine.com, which has our main keyword in it, “StarCraft” - describes that is is a magazine of some sort, “Zine” - and is short enough to remember.

Choosing a Web Host:

As mentioned above, a web host is who stores your website on the Internet. For many, choosing a web host can be difficult because of the technical details. How much space do you need? How much bandwidth? Then there are details that are less clear, like overselling, support availability and server up-time. What is a good price? Do they allow multiple website hosting (in case you decide to start several niche portal websites)?

In general, you only need minial resources to run your niche portal. For space, 100 MB should do just fine, and for bandwidth - 1 GB should work just great. Not many hosting providers offer lower than this, but either way - you will hardly use that much to get started. As for the other, less clear questions (overselling, support, and up-time), these answers only really come with trial and error. Many of the mainstream hosts, like 1&1 and Godaddy, have terrible records for overselling (selling their server resources to too many people, slowing everything for everyone). While smaller operations who do not oversell, will lack quality support. I can recomend two hosts, MediaLayer and ourseleves - Insidedesign. We host many resource demanding websites with medialayer.com and all of them work flawlessly. Their support is also very quick too (once we submitted a trouble ticket and had a respounce within 30 seconds!).

With just about any host you choose, be sure to ask questions related to topics brought up in the first paragraph of this section. If there is no clear way to ask questions, or if the sales associate sounds shakey, move on - there are billions of web hosts.

One Step Closer

You are now one step closer to running your own niche portal. Remember, this is a lot of fun - so once you learn the basics, you can run a bunch of them! This week, you learned the importance of a great domain name and a solid web host. A domain that has your main keyword in it and is easy to remember, will help build traffic. A solid web host ensure that your website is running 24/7!

Next week we will cover the Content Management System (CMS), or the system that will allow you to maintain your portal with ease. Then, we will review steps on updating the look of your portal to match your audience’s taste and expectations.

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