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Girl Geek Speaks Newsletter
Welcome to the long overdue May 2005 Issue of our newsletter for
the technically challenged and web site wannabe's. We feature
articles to help guide you through the process of designing,
building, and promoting your business web site. If you know
someone who may benefit from this newsletter, please forward it
to them in its entirety, or have them subscribe below.
In This Issue
Featured Article: What's all the Hoopla about Register.com's
$4.95/month website?
Article: What's All the Buzz about Blogs?
What's all the Hoopla about Register.com's $4.95/month
website?
Remember the old saying, "If something sounds too good to be
true, it is"? This is how I think about Register.com's new
television promotion of their $4.95/month website.
With no fear of losing potential client to Register.com, I want
to educate people as to what they'll get, but more importantly,
what are the limitations of online sitebuilders like these.
Register.com, one of the largest domain registration and
webhosting companies, is advertising like crazy lately for their
$4.95/month "do-it-yourself" website. If you just want a static
brochure type website, so you can say you have a web presence,
these kind of packages will accomplish that, but not much else.
In my opinion, this package would be great for a family, teen,
or personal website, but is unsuitable for a business website.
Online site builders or "do-it-yourself" websites are fine if
you absolutely need to start out inexpensively and get a site
online in a hurry. However, when/if your business starts to
grow, your website will be UNABLE to grow with you. You will end
up hiring a professional web designer to build your second
generation website, probably within 6-12 months. That's when
you'll call me, I hope!
I want to address what you will and will not get with the
Register.com "do-it-yourself" website. First, what do you get
for the $4.95 a month?
1. You get a 5- 20 page website with only 20 template designs to
choose from, which you cannot customize.
2. Options to put a customized form on the site, which is the
only interactivity it offers.
3. Only 5-10 megabytes of server space, which will get eaten up
fast if you put more than 1-2 images on the site.
Without purchasing a package myself to look at the
behind-the-scenes details, here's what you DON'T get.
1. No email accounts associated with the site or maybe only 1.
2. No way to optimize the site for search engines, which you'll
need for a regional/national market or Pay-Per-Click advertising
program.
3. No way to sell products or process credit cards on the site.
4. No file manager, which allows you to have complete control
over your website files
5. No ability to add a blog, email newsletter, or chat feature
to interact with your potential customers/clients
6. Limited number of times your pages can be viewed because of
limited data transfer.
7. No database for storage of customer/generated information,
sales orders, etc.
Other limitations include having your site essentially "held
captive" by the company because you don't own the code. If there
ever comes a time when you want to upgrade your site or its
functionality and want it to be able to do something like host a
chat feature, change the underlying code, or optimize the site
for search engines, you'd have to start from scratch with a
independent designer. Since the templates sitebuilders offer are
probably copyrighted, if the look of the site has become
familiar to your clientele, you will not be able to take that
with you. I've also seen it where you don't even own your domain
name once you cancel your account. I've worked with several
clients in this exact situation.
To get any of the features needed by most business websites (see
my article on this), you'd have to either hire a professional
designer and upgrade to the more expensive hosting packages, or
buy add-on features. In short, it usually ends up costing
business owner more than designing their own customized site and
hosting it independently. Why? Because where the sitebuilder/hosting
companies make their money is either in their high annual
hosting charges or they charge you for all these "add-on"
services, that increase the monthly hosting cost. These may
include site statistics packages, extra charge for a control
panel, high charges for a domain name, additional email boxes,
submission to search engines, online contact forms, secure
server licenses, shopping carts or design charges to customizing
your template or code.
So what starts out sounding like $4.95 a month for a website can
turn out to be much more expensive. Just wanted you to know.
What's All the Buzz about Blogs?
Thanks to Kathryn Lord for setting up a teleconference call on
Blogging. I've had 2 blogs going now, one for over a year. I use
this one http://girlgeekwebdesigns.blogspot.com for my FAQ page,
and another for promotion of my clinical practice.
What is a blog? Blog is short for "weblog." They started out as
online journals, but have been cooped for all kinds of use by
businesses.
Here are some sample uses of Blogs:
-
interaction/ongoing dialogue with customers/clients establishing your credibility and expertise by providing
information to your customers creating a "buzz" about new products or services getting direct and immediate feedback from customers/site
visitors FAQ pages As a more interactive substitute for email newsletters Through audioblogs, being able to establish rapport with
potential clients who get to hear your voice.
I set up my 2 blogs at www.blogger.com where the services is
FREE! I've also customized blogs for client using Blogger.com,
such that the blog looks exactly like their webpages. Try it!
You might like it!
DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS:
The above material is
copyrighted, but you may retransmit or distribute it as long as
not a single word is changed, added, or deleted, including the
contact information. However, you may not copy it to a web site.
Copyright 2005. All rights reserved.
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