How to have a business website for (almost) free

A friend of mine asked today how people who start a business get a website for that. I decided that it might interest other people too, hence this post.

You do the following:

1. Decide on a domain name. It must be short, sweet, easily recognizable and easy to remember. It must attract customers and be informative. For example, my website for tax credit consulting business has the domain name sred4you.com (SR&ED is one of the main technology-related tax credit programs in Canada). Another of my business sites is getyourmessageacross.com. Don’t call your website “mynews.com”, because no one is interested in your news. Call it “yournews.com”. It should be about your customer, not your own good self.
There are other considerations. A .com domain is more expensive but looks better. If you want a .ca domain, you will have to register with CIRA (it is free and very easy, you basically just need to confirm that you live or do business in Canada). .org domains are good for non-profit organizations. If your business is related to IT, you can get an .it domain which is cheaper than .com and you don’t have to live in Italy to register it.
2. Go to a website that sells domains (I went to godaddy.com but people tell me there are better ones) and check whether your domain name is already taken. It probably is – pretty much all the one-word domains already are. In this case you can either invent another domain name or try to buy your original one from whoever got there first. Some people buy domain names or even all the possible 4-letter acronyms hoping that one of these will be in high demand (like, for example, MSDN or AIDS) and they will make a profit. Your second-level domain name (this is the ABCD part in ABCD.com) may be available with another first-level domain, e.g. ABCD.org instead of ABCD.com. Sometimes, if your domain name is not available, the registrar site will offer you variations, like precisionABCD.com instead of ABCD.com. Don’t go for  that. Everybody knows this trick, and someone with the precisionXXXX.com domain name will appear a) cheap, b) lazy, c) devoid of imagination, and d) prone to choose the least resistance path. That is, unless your business really deals with precision machinery or something. What you can do is search the available domain names for your keywords right there on the registrar’s site: if you are going to be in patent research business, for example, you may search for “patent” and find out that “fastpatentsearch.com” or “thebestpatent.com” are not taken and can be yours.

3. Pay for the domain name. It will cost you somewhere between 10 and 20 dollars per year. While you are paying, the registrar site will probably offer you to buy their hosting (for just $20 a month) and their services for website development (just another $15-20 per month). Don’t do that. In a minute I am going to tell you how you can have free hosting and develop your site for free which will save you about $600 per year.

3a. Never ever be late with the annual payment for your domain name. Once you fail to pay, the name is up for grabs, even if it is your own brand name or something. Anyone can buy it and will have no obligations to return it. This happened to Microsoft when it forgot to renew hotmail.co.uk (I am not kidding!)

4. Go to a blogging platform (either blogger.com or wordpress.com) and start a blog. The URL for it will be something like mynewblog.blogspot (or wordpress, or whatever).com. Add a few pages and a few articles (the difference is that a page is pretty much like a page on any other site, while new articles are added from the top to one and the same page which looks like a blog we are all used to see). Honestly, it is not difficult at all. Anyone can blog. Now play with various “skins”/appearances. There are lots and lots of them available for free. You can select a serious theme or a frilly one, dark blue or magenta colour schema, a two-columns or three-columns layout, a header to which you can add any image you like, etc. The “blog” page is by default the main page of your site (yes, you almost have a site now!)  but if you like you can make another, stationary, page the main one.

5. Now go to your blog’s settings and set up redirection of your blog name to your domain name (johnsmith.blogspot.com must redirect to yourchosendomainname.com or whatever your newly bought domain name is). Blogspot allows you to do that for free, WordPress will charge a small amount of money per annum. Both of my sites, sred4you.com and getyourmessageacross.com, are on Blogspot. When setting up the redirection, if you are on Blogspot too, don’t forget to check the “add www in front of the URL” flag, otherwise the URL would not redirect to your website. (I.e. http://www.sred4you.com would work, but just sred4you.com would not.)

6. Wait a little (up to 24 hours) until all the domain name servers on the Internet get wind of your new domain name. Now you can type http://www.yourpreciousdomain.com in the browser address line and actually get to your website! Indeed, you have a website now!

7. To further customise the layout, you can add widgets (they are just building blocks of text, basically) with any text you like or content from other sites. For example, my blog that you see now has a widget that displays my tweets from Twitter and another that displays my books from Goodread. No programming was required – you just go to the Appearance/Layout view and drag and drop the widgets you like to the site layout.

8. You will see ads on both sides on this article in my blog. Don’t have ads in your business website. Your business website should advertise only one thing, and that’s your business.

9. If you are very serious about all that, you can buy hosting and create a standalone site using one of the platforms available for free, e.g. WordPress I already mentioned, or Drupal. WordPress is a fully fledged content management system (CMS, for short) by now. Drupal is also available for free and very easy to manage. This site (it belongs to our church parish) was made in Drupal.If you can program (even a little), you can do many wondrous and beautiful things with Drupal.

Now your website is ready, don’t forget to add its name to your business cards! Good luck!

Another of my  articles about media needs of a startup business with a small budget

My post for Blogging Idol contest – Your IT budget on a shoestring

You have recently started a business, but don’t have a huge budget for all things IT?

Here are 17 free or inexpensive tools that will help you to establish your online presence and spread the word.

1. Create a Facebook webpage for your business. (Not a group, though; only people who are on Facebook can see a group and participate in it, while a Facebook page can be seen by anyone.) Become a fan (there is a button for it) and ask all your Facebook friends to become fans, too. Cost: free

2. Create your company’s profile on LinkedIn. Cost: free

3. Blog! Blog a lot. Write something interesting and useful, so people want to come back for more. Write often, to become a habit with your readers. Cost: free

4. Microblog! Post on Twitter. (Take care and do not overspam your followers; post something they will find useful – information about freebies, discounts, promotions, news and events, for example.) “Live tweet” events on Twitter. Cost: free

5. Get yourself a good domain name – short and meaningful. Avoid acronyms. Speak to your reader. “YourNews.info” is better than “MyNews.com”. Cost: as low as $9 per year.

6. GoogleApps will give you a free hosting (but you will need your own domain name, see above). Cost: free

7. A business e-mail on hotmail does not look cool. You can get a free business e-mail from Google (but you will need your own domain name, see above). Cost: free

8. You can create your own professional-looking website on a blog platform, choosing one of a million freely available styles. Check out WordPress 2.7 – WordPress has recently grown into a full-scale content management system. Check out Blogspot, too. With Blogspot, you can redirect your domain name to your blog-based website for free, so it has a “grown-up” url and not a third-tier domain name. Blogspot, however, offers fewer features if you want to develop a full-scale website. You can use your own domain name with WordPress, too, but in this case you will have to pay a small amount to WordPress for the redirection (something like $15 a year). Decisions, decisions. Cost: free to $15.

9. TikiWiki is another powerful and free content management system and groupware. It is open source and free, and you can find hosting for as low as 0.95 per month. Cost: from $0.95 per month

10. Attend meetups and various camps: there is DemoCamp, Barcamp, CloudCamp, BookCamp, Podcamp and millions of others. When you register, insert a link to your website and blog. (Many event management systems, like Eventbrite, have this feature.) Cost: free

11. Search Engine Optimization. Check this great document from Google. Cost: free.

12. Use Google Analytics and Google AdWords to find out who is visiting your website and what they expect to find there. Cost: free.

13. Create videos and post them on YouTube. Create responses to other people’s videos. This simple and short presentation was viewed almost 800,000 times: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY

14. Inbound marketing. Create a toolkit, give people something they would want to use. Cost: free.

15. Turn your PowerPoint presentation into a Slideshare slide show. Cost: free.

16. Post your ads on kijiji and Craigslist. Cost: free.

17. Give people an opportunity to contribute. For example, create a wiki where people can share their experience and information about your product or service. Cost: priceless. People love to share, and you will contribute to the community building.

 

 

Il meglio e il nemico del bene

The new Facebook is awful. I cannot find anything, and the links I need, search for and stumble upon by pure miracle just don’t work.
Why do some people have an itch to “improve” something that works just fine?

Hussein Fazal: Social Network Advertising

I attended this great presentation by Hussein Fazal in December. Check it out if you want to know how to promote your product or service through social networks, getting the most of your advertisement dollar.

http://www.slideshare.net/hussein_fazal/social-network-advertising-presentation

My social networking (for business and pleasure)

I talked to my SEB program advisor the other day and mentioned that I try to attend one networking event a week, and not more than that (otherwise, I would have no time for the actual work). She was pleasantly surprised that I manage to find so many networking events while some other people just have no idea where to go and how to start. In fact, once you have a social network established and use the proper tools, the information starts coming from all directions.

All the further stuff is trivial for a digiterati, so, if you heard of Twitter or know what a RSS is, don’t bother to read on. However, today I got another reminder of the digital gap: a classmate in YorkU proudly mentioned she was going to a workshop where they will teach her to use comments in Microsoft Word and other advanced stuff. So, I suppose, these notes could be of use to someone.

30boxes.com sucks

1. Has no integration (except for importing my events from Facebook; for all the other types of calendars it suggests exporting events into a CSV file, and presumably I have to do this every time I add an event).
2. No integration for birthdays, even for importing them from Facebook (there was a box that I was supposed to click but it did nothing).
3. The thing assumed by default that I am in the US and adorned my calendar with Columbus day etc. There is life outside US, you know.
4. The application is full of bugs and usability crevices. The contact importing “wizard”, for example, does not allow you to import more than 100 contacts, but displays a “You can have up to 100 contacts in your account. To add more, you’ll first have to remove one.” about 200 times (my guess is, once for each contact that could not be imported).
5. I don’t really see the point of the whole thing, maybe it is the integration of social networking with a calendar, but right now it looks pretty unusable. Besides, a limit of 100 contacts is really, really funny. On the other hand, do I really need to know what 100 people are doing on any given day? I think I’d rather stick to Facebook for following what my friends are doing and to Google calendar+Toodledo (they actually integrate nicely) for todo lists and calendar functions.

Meetup + Facebook + kittens

Found out there is a Meetup application on Facebook. My heartfelt thanks to whoever wrote it. It is not very integrated (i.e. the meetup meetings will not appear on the FB Events calendar, or maybe I am missing something again, a fake highlighted blonde that I am). This kinda defies the idea of integration. However, I can now see what meetups my FB friends are going to (only if they registered Meetup on Facebook, which isn’t very integrated either.) However, there might be such feature on Meetup as friends search by name but I did not find it. However, Meetup, unlike Facebook, DOES have a “export event into your calendar” button that makes life easier.

So, the things that would be nice to have in Meetup-Facebook integration:

1. To be able to see my meetups in one list together with my Facebook events.
2. To see meetups of all my FB friends, not just those who added Meetup application.
3. To be able to dump my FB friends list into Meetup and friend them on Meetup too (right now, as far as I know, Meetup has no people search whatsoever, or maybe I don’t know where to look).

Alternatively, of course, people who use Meetup can migrate to Facebook and stay there so everybody is happy. AFAIK, aside from “export event into your calendar” button, Facebok has all the same functionality implemented.

On the same note (or an altogether different one), I found out that Jane Zhang fosters kittens for Toronto Humane Society. My deepest respect. I have one cat (taken, incidentally, from the same institution) and that’s pretty much all I can do.

Good customer service: priceless, or How one should NOT treat bitchy customers

As I have complained already, I had trouble exporting Facebook events into Google calendar. When I tried to export, Facebook gave me an .ics file and I for the life of me did not know what to do next. For some reason I supposed that there should be a link or a button or something, and when you press it, the event appears on your Google calendar (like Eventbrite does, and, by the way, that’s how I found Google calendar and started using it: that’s what I call good customer experience). Facebook offered nothing like that, and when I searched it I only found someone’s complaint that there is no application for exporting events. I decided that the logical place to seek help was with Facebook customer service. A message exchange ensued, pretty much along these lines:

I:
– Dear facebook customer service, how can I export FB events into Google calendar?
They:
– You can export your Events while viewing the main Events page, by clicking on the “Export Events” link at the top of this page. I apologize for this confusion. Please let me know if you have any further questions, and I will be glad to assist you.
I:
– All this link does is offering me to open the same .ics file with Firefox instead of Outlook.
They:
– Our records indicate that you are able to use this file successfully to import your events into your calander [SIC! – T.S.]. You will need to contact your Gmail, if you are experiencing difficulties. I apologize for this confusion. Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns, and I will be glad to assist you.
I:
– Could you please tell me, exactly HOW I must use this file to export events into Gmail calendar? (Also, please note that calendar is spelled with an “a”.) [Now, at this moment I am still unable to export events, and slightly pissed off with the whole situation]
They:
– Unfortunately, you will need to contact Google if you are experiencing difficulties with your file. I apologize for this inconvenience. Please let me know if you have any further questions, and I will be glad to assist you.

I feel that our talk turns into a conversation of a blind man with a deaf one. I start suspecting that one of us is an idiot, or maybe we both are. I enter “importing .ics file into google” into Google and in 3 seconds find a solution. I must explicitly import the darned .ics file using Google calendar’s user interface, and it is a standard operation. 1 more minute, and everything is done. I am happy. (By the way, this is how you do it.)

But then I think, WHY ON EARTH could not the customer service person tell me that outright, saving a few useless messages and her own time (to say nothing about mine)? Could she use Google in the same way that I did and tell me what she found? Of course. But SHE DID NOT BOTHER TO. I imagined my own conversation with a client:

Client:
– Dear Tania, how much will you charge for translating this text?
I:
– (this much) per word.
Client:
– How do I count the words?
I:
– My records indicate that you are able to use Microsoft Word functionality to count the words in your text successfully.
Client:
– Yes, but exactly how do I count the words?
I:
– Unfortunately, you will need to contact Microsoft if you are experiencing difficulties with your word count. I apologize for this inconvenience. Please let me know if you have any further questions, and I will be glad to assist you.

Ridiculous, right? Of course I am not responsible for teaching my clients to use Microsoft Word, but if I talked to them like in this imaginary dialogue, I guess I’d be without clients pretty soon. Hello, Facebook customer service? TAKE NOTES.

Facebook rant

Am I the only one freaked out by Facebook’s manner of posting updates? I’ll explain.

For example, one of my FB friends has recently updated her profile, including “relationship” in the list of things she looks for (you know the one I mean: “looking for networking/friendship/etc.”) FaceBook promptly notified me of the following: “AA BBB is now looking for a relationship!” I wonder what would my update say if I decided to include some personal information into my profile: “Tania is now interested in men and is looking for dating!” A nice thing to tell all of my FB friends, no doubt. Looks like a sudden orientation change or something.

I am also seriously pissed off by Facebook’s manner of referring to me as “them” and “their”. People normally do indicate their gender when filling out a FB profile, don’t they? So why doesn’t Facebook implement the simplest piece of logic that would use “him” and “his” for males, “her” for females and, OK, “them” and “their” for those with gender not indicated? Come on, this is not rocket science.