• Website addresses are easier to remember than either phone numbers or addresses.
  The website then becomes a back-up to the other forms of advertising that your business is doing – a sort of extension to your business card
• You have a product or service that you want people to know about.
  A website allows detailed information to be provided to potential customers.
• About 65% of Internet users say they use search engines to find local businesses, products or services.
• Your competitors have websites.
  “There’s a higher cost to not having a website than you can imagine.Your competitors are doing it, and having any site up is better than nothing. You can always improve it later.”
• It is basically a 24/7 internet billboard that tells people about your business.
  ie…….the location of your shop, hours of operations, services offered, prices…, etc. This is usually the least expensive way to go and would only take a page or two to do.
• You can use your site to reduce your marketing costs to geographically diverse locations.
• You can use your site to open new sales channels.
• You can use your site to enhance customer service.
• You can use your site to extend your current business into an entirely different product line.
• You can use your site to project a professional image.

There are basically two types of Websites, Informational and Ecommerce.
• Informational Websites provide information to others. There are several reasonsto have an informational Website:
  • To Tell Customers about your Business
  • To Describe your Services to your Customers
  • To Display a Calendar or Itinerary
  • To Display a list of Activities or Programs
  • To Display Company related Information
  • To Display Employee related Information
  • To Display a list of Projects and the Status of each
  • To provide links to other Web Pages or other Websites
• Ecommerce Websites Sell your Products to Customers.

Blogs are normally small, not-so-personal online websites where people writes down his/her thoughts on a certain subject.
• People use blogs:
  • To post intimate, excruciatingly detailed information about their everyday lives
  • To provide step-by-step information about projects they are working on
  • To write information about a certain hobby
• Companies use blogs:
  • To spread information on a product or service
  • To rank their website higher in Google SERPs, a.k.a. increase their visibility.

Resource: Marketingsherpa – How do customers search for products and services?

What is the World Wide Web? (also referred to as the WWW)
• The Web is a network of computers all over the world.
• All the computers in the Web can communicate with each other.
• All the computers use a communication standard called HTTP.

How does the WWW work?
• Web information is stored in documents called web pages.
• Web pages are files stored on computers called web servers.
• Computers reading the web pages are called web clients.
• Web clients view the pages with a program called a web browser.
• Popular browsers are Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

What is a Registrar?
• A company that is able to register “.com,” “.net,” and “.org” domain names by directly accessing the Central Domain Name Database. NameSecure is a registrar.

What is Web Hosting?
• A service that allows you to upload and store a site’s HTML documents and related files on a Web server. (This makes the files available on the World Wide Web for viewing by the public. Also called site hosting).

What is Website Maintenance?
• Maintenance refers to making changes to the contents of a Website. Changes can include text, images, pricing, links, and banners. Changes can be occasional, regular, or frequent.

What is a Web Server?
• The collection of all your web pages is called your website. To let others view your work, you must publish your website. To publish your work, you must copy your site to a web server. Most common is to use an Internet Service Provider (ISP).

How do I Transfer a Domain
• Contact your Registrar and request that your nameservers be changed from the address of your current/old Hosting company to your new Hosting company. If the domain name has expired, the domain name will need to be re-registered or if the name is now taken, you will need to register a new domain name.