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How To Move Your Business Online in 7 Steps

So you have set up your company, fairly established and generating some sort of revenue. Why should you take the most important step of starting online?


So you have set up your company, fairly established and generating some sort of revenue. Why should you take the most important step of starting online?

The online audience is massive - it's an


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information resource used by millions worldwide and continues to grow. Having your company information online can be a whole new way of attracting potential customers.

Step One: Choose a

Information as a concept bears a diversity of meanings, from everyday usage to technical settings. Generally speaking, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation.

Many people speak about the Information Age as the advent of the Knowledge Age [citation needed] or knowledge society, the information society, and information technologies, and even though information science and computer
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domain name

It is important to choose a domain name which is suitable for your

The domain name system (DNS) is a system that stores and associates many types of information with domain names, but, most importantly, it translates domain names (computer hostnames) to IP addresses. It also lists mail exchange servers accepting e-mail for each domain. In providing a worldwide keyword-based redirection service, DNS is an essential component of contemporary Internet use.
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business. If you want to be able to say your domain name over the phone, then it should be easy to spell and short to make it easier for your customers.

Usually, it's best to have the name of your website as your domain name, for example; www.yourcompany.co.uk. If your company name has already been taken there are several ways around this, here are some examples:

www.your-company.co.uk

www.yourcompanyltd.co.uk

www.company.co.uk

You could also choose from .com or .co.uk which are the most common and popular, however there are different domains for organisations (.org.uk) or new ones such as .com.uk

Whichever you choose you must check the availability on www.123reg.co.uk

Step Two: Host your Website

What does this mean? Basically, you need to find a space where your website can be built on the

In economics, business is the social science of managing people to organize and maintain collective productivity toward accomplishing particular creative and productive goals, usually to generate revenue.

The etymology of "business" refers to the state of being busy, in the context of the individual as well as the community or society. In other words, to be busy is to be doing commercially viable and profitable work.
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Internet. A good metaphor for this, is finding land to build your house on, where the house is your website.

There are 3 main things you need to be aware of when choosing a company to host your site.

How large your site is i.e. total sizes of all pages which make up your siteHow much bandwidth it requires i.e. how many visitors want to access itHow your website is built - if your site uses

The Internet (also known simply as the Net) can be briefly understood as "a network of networks". Specifically, it is the worldwide, publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and governmental networks, which together carry various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat, file transfer, and the interlinked Web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web.
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PHP,
PHP is an open-source, reflective programming language. Originally designed as a high-level tool for producing dynamic web content, PHP is used mainly in server-side applications.
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ASP, other
Active Server Pages (ASP) are Microsoft's server-side technology for dynamically-generated web pages that is marketed as an add-on to Internet Information Services (IIS).

Programming ASP websites is made easier by various built-in objects. Each object corresponds to a group of frequently-used functionality useful for creating dynamic web pages. In ASP 2.0 there are six such built-in objects: Application, ASPError, Request, Response, Server and Session. Session, for example, is a cookie-based session object that maintains variables from page to page. Application
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languages or
A language is a method of communication. Human spoken and written languages can be described as a system of symbols (sometimes known as lexemes) and the grammars (rules) by which the symbols are manipulated. The word "language" is also used to refer to common properties of languages.

Language learning is normal in human childhood. Most human languages use patterns of sound or gesture for symbols which enable communication with others around them. There are thousands of human languages, and these seem to share certain properties, even though many shared properties have exceptions.
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database driven this may increase the cost.Step Three: Set Up your Email AccountsSetting up your email accounts can be an easy stress free experience. There are 4 main components to each account, these are :

Username

Password

Pop account

A database is an organized collection of data. The term originated within the computer industry, but its meaning has been broadened by popular use, to the extent that the European Database Directive (which creates intellectual property rights for databases) includes non-electronic databases within its definition. This article is confined to a more technical use of the term; though even amongst computing professionals, some attach a much wider meaning to the word than others.
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SMTP account

These will be provided by your

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the de facto standard for e-mail and internet fax transmissions across the Internet. Formally SMTP is defined in RFC 821 (STD 10) as amended by RFC 1123 (STD 3) chapter 5. The protocol used today is also known as ESMTP and defined in RFC 2821.
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hosting company and all you need to do is add an email account with the above settings. Your hosting company will help you through this.

Step Four: Develop a Website

Either design the site yourself (see article called 'Can I design a website myself?') or hire a professional to design it for you. Ensure you capture all information you want to present to your visitors in an easy to navigate website - where information can be found easily.

There are many aspects to consider when developing a website. The content of your site is incredibly important, you may want to hire a copywriter or someone who is skilled in this area. Another aspect is the overall design and look of the site, depending on what kind of image you want to portray, a good eye for design would really help.

If you want to optimise your website, this is the time to be thinking about it. By optimisation we mean creating developing a website which can be easily read by

An Internet hosting service is a service that runs Internet servers, allowing organizations and individuals to serve content to the Internet. There are various levels of service and various kinds of services offered.
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search engines so that for certain keywords you can be listed at the top of a results page.

The last thing to consider is how you are going to maintain the content of your website. There are 3 basic options to this:

1. Website Maintenance - most

A search engine or search service is a program designed to help find information stored on a computer system such as the World Wide Web, inside a corporate or proprietary network or a personal computer. The search engine allows one to ask for content meeting specific criteria (typically those containing a given word or phrase) and retrieves a list of references that match those criteria. Search engines use regularly updated indexes to operate quickly and efficiently. Without further qualification, search engine usually refers to a Web search engine, which searches for information on the public
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web design companies will also offer to keep your website maintained for an hourly fee. So whenever you want to change bits and pieces you would get in touch with the designers who would up date it for you. This is best used for companies who may only want to change small amounts of their site from time to time.

2. Content Managed Systems (CMS) - if you feel that you want to up date your site more often, you can add a CMS. This is basically an easy to use, user friendly module where you can update, add, remove and edit your content and images.

3. DIY - of course you can Do-It-Yourself if you have some

Web design is the design of web pages, websites and web applications using HTML, CSS and images.

Web design is part of starting a website (web development) which can include web server configuration, writing web applications and server security.
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HTML knowledge (if your site is HTML) or are willing to put some of your time aside to learn. However, if your site is designed using Flash this may get a lot more technical.

Step Five:

In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages with hypertext and other information to be displayed in a web browser. HTML is used to structure information — denoting certain text as headings, paragraphs, lists and so on — and can be used to describe, to some degree, the appearance and semantics of a document. HTML's grammar structure is the HTML DTD that was created using SGML syntax.
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SEO Submission

Once your website is completed, you want to attract visitors to your site. The first step to allowing people to find you is to submit your website to search engines. The most important reason for this is so that search engines know you are out there, and if you get nothing else from it - at least when a user types in your company name, you should appear at the top of the search engines results. This is beneficial for anyone who may have heard from company name and wants to find your website on the Web.

Another important step is to add your web address to as many free directories as possible as this increases your page rank with search engines.

Step Six: Internet Marketing

There are millions of sites out there trying to get that number 1 position on search engines by optimisation, and unfortunately not everyone can have it! The more common keywords are exceptionally difficult and with search engines continually changing their method for ranking websites this has become a less effective way of Internet Marketing.

A much more proven Internet Marketing technique is Pay Per Click. The majority of search engines have premium listings where they sell the top positions on their results pages. The way they work is explained in more detail in the article 'How does Pay Per Click work'. However in a nutshell, the general idea is as follows:

You enter a price for every keyword you think a potential customer of your company would enter into a search engine, on average it is around 30p.Every time a visitor clicks on that link they will be taken to your site.You only pay when someone actually clicks on your link.If more than one company put a price on a certain keyword, the company who has put the highest price gets the top position.

Other ways to attract visitors to your site is to place banners on other related websites which have a larger number of visitors. The banner would then have a link to your website.Step Seven: Include your website on any stationery and promotional materialNow that you are set up, you can start publishing your website on any printed material so that your customers and clients are aware of it.

And that's it! Of course, this is just a summary, but in essence its the basic steps in having a presence online and getting the most out of it.

Elaborations Ltd is a Design company with offices in West London. It was founded in 2003 by Brad Bagherian. Elaborations specialises in helping small to medium businesses create an image with an impact. A company's image is just as important as its products and services, so we produce designs and create an image to give potential customers that crucial first impression and reflect what their company is all about. The main area which we concentrate on is presenting that image on the web, website design and development, as well as graphic design, internet

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings, and could be considered a subset of search engine marketing. The term SEO also refers to "search engine optimizers," an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients' sites. Some commentators, and even some SEOs, break down methods used by practitioners into categories such as "white hat SEO" (methods generally approved by search engines, such as building content and improving site quality), or "black hat SEO" (tricks such as cloaking an
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marketing and multimedia.



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