A Host Is For Life, Not Just For Christmas – Things To Consider When Choosing Your Web Host

If you have a website that you are looking to find a new host for or if you have a new site ready to go live and face its public, you simply must spend time researching a massively important factor in any website – who you host it with. Many people over look the importance of choosing a good host, often going for the cheapest one, which is often a bad mistake when things go wrong or you find out the hosting package is not adequate for your needs.

Below, we look at what we feel is important when it comes to choosing the right host for your website and business.

Location – One of the most important factors when it comes to choosing a host is to make sure their servers are located in the country that your website is meant to be aimed at. For example, if your website is simply for people of the UK, make sure you choose a hosting company that is based in the UK and also has its servers in the same country, as one of the ranking factors is the location of where the website is hosted in correlation to the person searching.

Price – Choosing the cheapest host is often not the right thing to do, as if you are going to go for something that seems stupidly under priced then you could find the hosting company lacking the required technology or service support. Choose something that seems reasonable and well structured and you can find many comparison websites on the Internet which ranks the hosts and their prices, so do your research before you splash the cash for a year.

Features – Depending on your website, you may need more features than another website, so it’s important you know what you need and then go looking for it. FTP access, control panel access and webmail are three of the main things we think all customers should have access to. It’s also important to make sure their email systems allow you to have access to your mail on your smart phone, as even in this day and age some firms still do not have this functionality.

Reputation – The Internet has done many amazing things and one of the most important is to allow people and users, customers and clients to leave honest feedback about millions of different products, services and customers, and hosting firms do not escape this critique. There are a few popular hosting review websites, just search in Google for “web hosting reviews” to find these, and make sure you have a good look at the hosting companies you might be considering and the reviews that people have left of them.

Support – From time to time things are inevitably going to go wrong, so you need to make sure you choose a host that offers 24 hour support via a method of communication that suits you. Location also comes into this as you should really be choosing a host located in your country, as you might waste valuable up time by waiting for them to respond if outside of your time zone. There are both online and offline publications where people can review their hosting experiences so it is vital you spend time researching how well your host will react to any problems you might encounter.

Church School Awards Website

The Church School Awards is a new event, launching September 2010, open to all Church Schools, promoting the fantastic and vital work done in the areas of community cohesion and global citizenship. The Award is an opportunity for everyone involved in Christian education to celebrate the unique and vital work that students, teachers, governors and staff do for their local communities, for our country and throughout the world.

Net9design produced the logos, website design  and developed the site in WordPress CMS. The site has a full membership system for user to register, and send thier application for the Church School Awards.

Visit the Church School Awards website – Here

Top Ten Things To Test Before Your Website Goes Live

When you are ready to launch your new website it is vital you spend time testing the final results, even if you have made it yourself or have paid a lot of money for it. Things do go wrong when you go from testing and building to live, so you have to take the time to sit down and test the site in full, asking friends, family and anyone else to also test the site before it gets indexed or advertised.

Below, we look at our top ten things you simply have to test before the website goes live and starts getting traffic.

Menus

Make sure your menus work, especially if they are drop downs or some other interactive type of menu. Go through and make sure all of the menus open and are in the correct order and in the right place.

Fonts

Try to be consistent and make sure all of the text is of the same font, or at least the same family of fonts. Sometimes, if you do not code the page or the CSS correctly, it can lead to having multiple font types on the page, which looks really bad and quite unprofessional unless you plan this.

Pages

If you have 10 or 100 pages, you need to click through ALL of them and make sure they work, because everyone one of these pages could become a landing page in some way so its vital you do spend the time checking all pages and just making sure everything is ok.

Images

Depending on the browser being used, you may or may not be aware of images not loading when you test your site. Firefox manages to hide non loading images very well, but Internet Explorer will give you the red cross of death, so make sure your images load and are property alt tagged up, which helps people with limited vision to use your site better.

Videos

Check the videos load quickly and completely, as a slow video will drive people away and an incomplete video will just leave users frustrated and quite annoyed that they spent time to view something that is simply not finished.

Links

If your site contains outgoing links or a lot of internal navigational links, make sure they all work by testing them before the site goes live. It is also sometimes a good idea to have a paragraph in your terms and conditions to mention that you have no control of what is contained on the site they follow the link to, as if the outgoing site gets hacked you do not want it reflecting on your business.

Contact Form

Producing a contact form is one thing, producing one that works, sends the email to you and also tells the user it has been successfully sent is another. Make sure that you test all of the contact forms on your website, which might be a time consuming exercise but a vital and definitely necessary one.

Text Details

Does your site have a phone number on it? If so, dial it and make sure it connects to you. Such a simple thing to say but there have been a few instances that we have seen where people mistype the phone number and do not spot it for a long time after, imagine how many calls you might of missed!

Browsers

It is crucial to make sure that you try your website in all of the major browsers, which include Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and for Mac users, the Safari browser. Even though the two most common browsers are Internet Explorer and Firefox, Chrome and Opera have quite a loyal following so you need to make sure the site works the best it can in all browsers.

Speed

Speed is a vital aspect for any website, especially as it is now one of the ranking factors in the Google algorithm. People will not want to spend ages waiting for a site to load so its vital you make sure the pages load as quickly as possible and as fluidly as possible as well.

How To Choose The Right Web Design Company For You

Taking the step of employing a web design company to design your new website can sometimes be a daunting one, especially with hundreds of web design firms in any one area or radius to choose from. Therefore, it is vital that you do your research and make sure the company you are going to hand your money to are the best you possibly can find and ultimately will deliver you something you can be totally happy with.

Below, we look at the most important things that we believe are essential that you take into account before choosing your web design company to deliver your new website or project.

Think About Location – We believe that using a local web design company is a must if you really want to make sure that your website is delivered on time and to a very high quality. We speak from experience when we say that by using a local company you can remain on top of the project much more efficiently and having someone your can physically go and see if there are issues really is worth its weight in gold.

Ask Them For A Quote – Everyone has a budget so make sure you set yours from the outset and then contact a few web design companies for a quote. If they are well outside of your budget then it is often not worth making yourself bankrupt just to afford it. In this situation you have two choices, reduce your specification or choose a web design firm that fits your budget a bit better than the others.

Check Out Their Portfolio – A web design company should have a portfolio of work; a good web design company should have a great portfolio of work. Look at their website and then spend time checking out their previously completed projects. Make sure you like what they do and that they have a good variation of projects and good design skills, but just because you do not see something you would choose does not mean they are not any good, you need to concentrate on how good their previous designs are and how well the sites work.

Read / Request A List Of Testimonials – People love to tell the world if they have found someone good and worth working with, a web design company is no different. Check through their testimonials and request permission to contact some of the previous clients directly, many firms will allow you to do this and it is absolutely vital you do so. NEVER be embarrassed to check out how good they really are by making that phone call.

Optimised Or Just Good Looking? – A good looking website does not equal a successful website. Having something pretty and flash does not mean you will have loads of visitors making enquires and landing on your site. A good website is an optimised and ranking website, just like a high street shop is only successful if you have the visitors making the purchases within.

Meet With Them – And finally, where possible, go and meet them. There is nothing you can do that is more important than sitting down and meeting the people who will be in charge of your website. Whether you are spending £500 or £5000, you need to trust the people that are ultimately in charge of making sure your website is going to deliver something you will be proud of and above all, be successful.