Website Hosting & Design

Glen Allsopp / One Comment / June 6th, 2007 / Subscribe via RSS

This is part 2 of our Building & Marketing a Niche Website series, and its about Website Hosting & Design!.

Website Hosting

If you are going to be serious about your website then you are going to need to be serious when picking a host. The thing I most look for in hosting is support, thats why for smaller sites I use Jortex and for dedicated servers I use someone like FDCServers. These are good hosts in my opinion, but that doesnt mean you should use them, when looking for a host consider the following:

Community, if they have forums how active are they? The member number can sometimes show you an estimate of how many clients / customers they have
Support, as stated this is a huge thing for me. If they have live chat on their site then even better (as long as its on). MSN communication is also a huge factor for me and one of the reasons I use Jortex
On site Content - I hate sites like Namecheap where there knowledge base doesnt even work half the time or even a site that has a nice knowledgebase but nothing in it, whats the point?

If you know your stuff when it comes to hosting and servers already, you might not really need any support so just get a reliable host with good uptime.

Design

Again, I’m sorry to keep saying this throughout the series but it really does depend on the type of site that you are promoting. If you are promoting a site which is about gardening tools and where to buy them (affiliate-style) then you might want a landing page or a lovely greenery style website. If you are offering a site on vista guides you may have to hire a coder on some Webmaster Forums to be able to get a design similar to the operating system itself.

Of course you dong have to pay for a design, if you have any idea on editing html or just content on html based templates then you can do a google search for ‘Free CSS Templates’ and find tonnes of sites offering lots of lovely designs for free. You may need to keep the creator credit in-tact but apart from that do some tweaks to make it unique to your site, its free so why not?

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