Web hosting refers to paying a web hosting company to rent space on their web server or “host” your web site.

All web sites need to be hosted somewhere and there are a lot of web hosting companies to choose from. Here are the top things to look for in a web hosting company.

1. Bigger companies are better. There is something to be said about shopping locally but you want a web hosting company that is big enough to have the infrastructure to support your website (data redundancy, backup generators, big internet pipes, etc)
2. Good support. Ask around and read reviews online to make sure the company you pick for web hosting will offer timely support when something goes wrong.
3. Price. This goes without saying, but like anything, remember that the cheapest is not always the best.

Template based websites always tend to look like templates and are often rough around the edges. For a small business just starting out, or when marketing budgets are extremely tight or nonexistent, one of these free or low cost websites is probably the best solution.

For the growing business looking to make a good impression on potential customers, a custom designed website is among the best, and certainly among the cheapest, marketing investments you can make.

A couple of good reasons why you might want a CMS include:

• Save money over time not paying a web designer to handle changes to your site.
• Keep your content fresh by making frequent changes easily thereby encouraging repeat visits.

To learn more about content management systems see our article 5 Advantages of a Content Management System

Ads - Google and others allow you to place ads on your website and pay you for clicks from your site, a good starting place is https://www.google.com/adsense/

Affiliates – Many sites have affiliate networks where you are payed every time a paying customer originates from your website. Some good starting places are https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/ or http://www.cj.com/

Sales - You can create and sell unique items through Cafe Press, all you need is artwork, once you upload it you can apply it to a wide number of products from mouse pads to t-shirts and coffee mugs. http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/

Donations – If you have a good cause you can add a PayPal donate button and get visitors to donate online. https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donate-intro-outside

In the free category I would recommend Tumblr which offers a very nice free blog. They have some nice looking design templates to choose from and you can attach your account to your Facebook and Twitter account which is nice.

In the low cost paid category I would recommend Page.ly which for $14.98 per month offers a quick 2 minute setup, your choice of some nice looking templates and a free domain name. Also because Page.ly is powered by Wordpress you have the ability to install any Wordpress plugin so you have an almost unlimited ability to customize and add functionality.

To break the process down a little bit. First we create a nice looking design that represents your business well, then we have to code all the pages into HTML, the language that your web browser reads, make all the graphics and images and optimize them to download quickly. Then we need to make sure that all of our work will look good no matter what browser or operating system someone is using by testing and making revisions. We also have to make sure our work will perform well on search engines. It all adds up to a lot of hours in front of the computer. The average website we develop takes between 40 and 80 hours of work.

There are some low-cost, template based alternatives available to the budget conscious business that I will discuss in a future installment here.

All too often businesses get their new websites designed and then forget about them and expect them to do the rest. Business people sometimes assume that if a website doesn’t take off, that the web designer hasn’t done his job correctly, that may be true in some cases, but for a website to really excel it needs to be treated like a high maintenance girlfriend. Here is my list of the top 5 things you can do to set your website on fire and make it really take off.

• Blog – This brings us back to the old cliche about content being the ruling monarch or some other such drivel, the point is that your content is everything. Good wordy content drives search engine ranking up, it also encourages people to spend time on your site and it motivates visitors to return to your site again and again. Blogging is the best way for a website owner to add content to a website regularly and tools like RSS help disseminate that information and drive traffic too. Set a schedule and stick to it, one new entry a week, or a day or whatever works with your schedule.
• Inbound links - Probably as important to website ranking as good text content is inbound links, that is links on other sites that point to your website. There are a myriad places online where one can get linked. Online directories related to your local area or your particular industry, reciprocal links, blog comments and discussion forums. It takes more time and patience than anything else to find these places and get linked, but your efforts will be rewarded as your search engine ranking rises. Search engines aside, inbound links are good for the traffic they generate too.
• Social networking - Another great way to drive traffic is to get your business on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking websites. Be aware though that simply creating a presence on these sites is not enough, you need to contribute to these communities by connecting to others and posting relevant information. There are tools available now that will connect many blog systems to your social networking account, so for example, when I post this article to my blog it will also appear automatically on my Facebook and LinkedIn account. This saves time posting to a lot of different sources and makes short work of keeping all your online marketing efforts up to date. Other tools of use in this area are sites like http://ping.fm/ that can post to various social networking sites at once.
• Email newsletter - A great way to market to your web contacts is by implementing an email newsletter. This is fairly inexpensive to set up on your website and can bring great returns because once you are set up it costs you nothing to send out as many of these as you have names in your database. If you are going to set an email newsletter up on your website take the time to schedule a time each month (or whatever schedule you want to keep) to write and send out your newsletter, a newsletter system that doesn’t get used is money wasted.
• Mix things up - A static site does not encourage repeat visitors, update your website frequently. This is especially true of your home page, at least once a year you should change the look of your home page. This gives the impression that your company is active and will encourage people who have been to your site before to spend some time digging deeper to see what else has changed often times reading information that has been there for a long time.

A well designed, well thought out website can do a great deal on its own, but to really excel it needs care and nurturing. This doesn’t need to be expensive, in fact all of the above suggestions you can do yourself, you just have to make the time.

Any other ideas? What have you done to make your website take off? Leave comments below.

Early this morning the newest incarnation of iLab New Media went online. This latest design improves on the last in many way (in my opinion). The last design was new in August but never really lived up to my original vision, maybe because I just never took the time to polish it up, I spent some time recently thinking about what I could do to make it better and ended up by just scrapping it and starting over.

Check out these features in the new design:

• Handy quote form – never more than a menu slide away on any page.
• Sweet portfolio, just as convenient as the quote form and with BIG screenshots available.
• Nice big splash screen on the home page.
• Changeable backgrounds.

This site does not support Internet Explorer 6, it is literally chuck full of alpha-transparent pngs and I am making no effort to swap them out. According to Google Analytics IE6 makes up for less than 1% of my web visitors.