by WebKeyDesign | Feb 13, 2006 | Web Site Basics
Lately I have had many inquiries about Windows Web Hosting, and since I only offer Linux based web hosting to my clients, I felt it necessary to point out a few things when it comes to web hosting and choosing the right host for your web site projects.
Your primary concerns when choosing a web host should be that a web host is reliable and meets the requirements for your web site. This may include having multiple databases, parked domains, or simply having a certain amount of bandwidth. If your site is dependant on Microsoft technologies such as ASP or using data from an Access database, then your hosting requirements can only be met by choosing a Windows web host. Although you may be able to run some of your site on another type of host, it is preferable to use a Windows host, since your site will perform better and there will be less conflicts than if you were to choose a Linux host.
One of the things you may notice about Windows Web Hosting is that there can sometimes be a price difference, with Windows hosting costing as much as double the price of a basic cPanel Linux host. While it is not clear if license costs are the driving force for higher prices, you should consider that the ease of use of Windows and the ability to utilize Microsoft-only technologies do add some cost to Windows web hosting. As a comparison consider Apple’s .Mac services which cost higher than standard web hosting, because Apple is primarily selling its services on ease of use. This is the same situation in the Windows hosting market. The ease of use and ability to run ASP driven sites will cost you extra.
In the Linux hosting market you give up the use of Microsoft technologies, but you get a very reliable and proven solution in Apache + MySQL + PHP. You may also find that Linux hosting packages are more diverse, ranging from small space and bandwidth allotments, to very large gigabyte accounts that even occasional webbloggers can afford. In addition to being less expensive, there are many scripts and third party solutions that are available. You may find more competitively priced packaged solutions than in the Windows market.
Perhaps the difference (other than price) between a Windows host and a Linux host is the technical one. While almost everyone is somewhat familiar with a Windows desktop, not everyone is familiar with Linux and it may take a while for a new webmaster to become comfortable with the differences. However all new webmasters will have to learn about web hosting in general, so this should not deter you in choosing a Linux host over a Windows host. You will find that almost any technical issue with Linux hosting can be resolved by researching it on Google and Yahoo. And if you hire someone to do your site’s maintenance, this may not be a concern at all.
by WebKeyDesign | Jan 23, 2006 | Web Site Basics
Over the weekend, I set out to buy a new domain name for a project that I thought about doing last year. By this time I should have written up the content, but I of course put it off, and so I figured I would buy the domain and that would force me to write up content and work on the new site. By now, buying any two word domain with the .com tld is nearly impossible, so you really have to look through the deleted domains and hope you can catch a unique domain name that someone let expire. I ended up having to choose between a new three word combination domain and an expired two word domain that seemed perfect for what the new site will be talking about. The three word domain sounded great, but the two word domain fit better with what search engines would look for, so I ended up choosing the expired domain.
Domains For Sale
I did find a lot of domain names that were taken and which were for sale by their owners, but most of these domains had scrapper content and did not really have any initial value. Not willing to pay for a domain with a pagerank of 2 or less and having to deal with the mess of transfering ownership, I headed for WhoIs.net and started searching through their deleted domains section. Luckily for me, I did find a domain of value in there and all I had to do was go to my own domain registrar and add that domain name to my account. At the end of the day I had a new domain name that costs me my regular price! Before you consider purchasing a domain name from someone, look through the deleted domain lists. All though some registrars have services that help you do this, or have auctions for domain names, looking through WhoIS.net’s free search tool may end up being better and cost you nothing more than the price of a new domain name.
Buyer Beware
Hopefully my new domain will rank well in the next search engine updates and I will have a successful site in a few weeks. However not all deleted domains or current domains are bargains. If you never bought a domain name before, read Choosing Your Domain Name and consider reading through some of the articles on SitePoint.com. If you still have questions, contact us, and we will try to help you.
My new project is MovieComment.com, which is going to be a new blog site for all kinds of movie reviews.
by WebKeyDesign | Jan 12, 2006 | Web Site Basics
I must admit that I totally forgot about this, last week, when I brought up the subject of splogs (sites that steal your content). There is a link on every page of WebKeyDesign.com that points to our Terms of Use policy. Under the Personal and Commercial Use section there is a statement that prohibits any other site from copying our content. However the statement did not mention RSS Feeds specifically. I have now changed the statement to read:
You may not modify, reformat, copy, display, distribute, transmit, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer or sell any information, products or services obtained from the Services, except as permitted by these Terms of Use or under applicable laws. This restriction means, among other things, that you may not mirror on your own Web site, the home page, content pages, or RSS feeds of this Web site or any WebKeyDesign Site.
Though I am sure that this statement will not stop sploggers, it will at least make clear what WebKeyDesign.com’s policy is on content theft.
If you do not have a Terms of Use page on your site, you should seriously consider adding one. Most commercial sites have long and complicated terms, but for a personal site you probably can get by with a more simplified statement. The best plan is to consult a lawyer or someone who knows the law, but I know many webmasters end up using Google to piece together a decent Terms of Use page.
The main purpose of the Terms page is to protect your site from liability, and of course to protect your site’s content from theft. Most Terms pages you find are very restrictive, for example NBA.com, does not allow any other site to link to any internal page within its site. You must only link to the main page. Which is pretty ridiculous, but it is what NBA.com has for its linking policies.
Once you finish your Terms Of Use page make sure it is visible on all your site’s pages.
by WebKeyDesign | Dec 27, 2005 | Web Site Basics
With WordPress 2.0 coming out this week, it only seems fitting that I write something about Content Management Systems. Many webmasters find it hard to choose the right CMS or weblog script to run their site. Other than trying out the demos on sites like OpenSourceCMS.com and reading an occasional review, most CMS scripts are not very well reviewed. Just recently though, MacInTouch.com started one of their user contributed reports on the subject of CMS scripts. Although the report is for webmasters currently interested in running a CMS script on Mac OS X, the information and user comments on different scripts is helpful for your basic Linux server setup.
Content Management System (CMS) Report
by WebKeyDesign | Dec 6, 2005 | Web Site Basics
A while back I covered the subject of how to choose the right weblog CMS, but what I forgot to mention is that many people who start their first website do not even think about using a weblog or a content management system to begin with. They usually put together some sort of site using either a basic web site creator tool which usually relies on frames for navigation or use template that they found. The results usually are not very eye pleasing and barely functional. This is why for many first time web sites I recommend WordPress, because it does two things very well, the first being that it is feature loaded with almost everything a beginning site author needs to create content easily, and secondly because it adds structure to help make your site more pleasing to search engines and site visitors. For a long time I thought the Kurbick template which many blog systems use now, was boring, but then I realized that blogs do something which no Dreamweaver template does. It takes care of the layout and structure for you, so you can get on with writing your content. This has allowed the Personal Web Page to flourish with new content almost daily. The personal publishing revolution is in sense only possible because of tools like WordPress and Textpattern. So if you are considering your first web site, consider a blogging or content management system to drive your site.
How To Define Content
When it comes to new websites, less is really more. What that means is that you need to cater to your audience and you need to add content and less features. Many first time web site owners feel the urge to visit sites like HotScripts.com, and install every script and web application they can find for their site. The result is usually a site that has multiple areas, many of these areas go unused and are seldom updated. The gallery, the forum, the chat area, guestbooks which are so 1990-ish, are all examples of additional areas that you see on many personal sites. The more options you add to to your site, the more confusing your site will be to your visitors. The idea is to focus on two or three main areas of your site, typically your blog and one more area is enough. This is especially important if you will be the only person updating the site with content. Eventually you might find a forum to be very popular with visitors, that this area will eventually take care of itself, but this is not always the case. What matters most is content, not content areas. The number of pages, blog entries, forum posts are what matter most, and not how many different directions site visitors can take on your site. So if you are thinking of adding a forum, a gallery, a second blog, think about how often these additional areas can be maintained and if you really need them at all.
Color Schemes
Another topic which is hard to understand for first time webmasters is color scheme. Although a good CMS or blog script can give you layout, most of the time you will want to change the color scheme and this is where perhaps not taking art in school really does become a weakness. Color schemes are not exactly easy to come by for many people, and after so many hours of watching Trading Places, you can still not know much about picking the right ones. This when looking at other sites and asking for opinions help. What I mean by color scheme is your overall design colors, graphics, and of course your link colors. For me personally, computer operating systems tend to use shades of gray and blue on purpose, mostly because gray is neutral, and blue is the one color which is pleasing and not harsh on the eyes. Even Apple’s Mac OS X, which started out as white with pinstripes, has started to change back to a more subdued gray white and forget some of its original white and rainbow gel colors. Windows98 is an even better example of gray and blue design. Choosing something besides white or gray is really very hard to do, but some web design actually manages to pull it off, usually its a white and red or a green nowadays. However for me, blue and red are still the defaults for links and it is hard to choose anything else.
The Web Is Not Suppose To Be Boring
One of the more annoying things that I find nowadays with web sites is the growing number of garbage sites, many of which are nothing more than just random collections of RSS feeds or scrapper sites, which copy their content from other sites via scripts. It is not that I have strong feelings on republishing content, it is that these sites are in fact pretty boring and really not useful at all. If you can’t entertain or have a legitimate use, then yes, I would say your site is boring. The harsh reality is that many of these sites are being indexed more and more, and end up coming up on most search engines as being relevant, but in fact are not even close. If you really are going to do a web site, make it either useful (informative in some manner) or at least interesting by making it personal (adding your opinion or views). Scrapper sites really do suck and they really serve no purpose to real web surfers. Perhaps I am being harsh, but after doing so many searches on Google and ending up at so many scrapper sites, its bound to dawn on anyone that scrapper sites are boring.
by WebKeyDesign | Nov 25, 2005 | Web Site Basics
This week I added an SSL certificate to WebKeyDesign, so that our clients could have encryption for some of the services they use and to assure new clients using our web hosting form that there information was secure. Needless to say if you have taken a look at the SSL market, the prices do seem to be out of line with the web hosting and domain registration markets. For example a small personal site for hosting and domain registration could cost as little as $60 for the year, but a basic one domain only SSL certificate costs you anywhere from $49 to $150 for the year! This does not even include the fee that most web hosts have to charge you for installing the certificate, which could be another $50.
The main reasoning for SSL certificates is that for ecommerce, you really need to offer encryption for credit card transactions, but also SSL certificates are suppose to convey some sort of validity to your site visitors. The encryption is easy to do, you could generate what is called a free SSL certificate, but no browser would recognize your certificate as being properly authorized, hence free certificates convey no such trust to your site visitors, and so are inadequate for ecommerce sites. This leaves you with only a proper authorized certificate, which come in many forms and which offer different features. The idea being that the more features a Certificate Authority offers you, the more trusted your site will seem.
As a webmaster then, it would seem that if you just pick the most expensive SSL certificate, then this would equate into more transactions, but this is not always the case. The problem is that many internet users do not know the difference between an expensive SSL certificate and an inexpensive one, most site users end up just looking for the little padlock icon that shows up somewhere in the corner of their browser. No padlock, means no security in the mind of most site visitors. The case is only slightly different with more adapt internet users, but it still comes down to just secure or not secure. An avid internet user may just look for the url to start with https and view that as being secure. For the most part both of these conclusions are correct, that the padlock and https urls indicate secure encryption, or at the very least some sort of secured connection between the browser and the web site. However that is far as it goes, you cannot really know how any SSL certificate or feature will really be viewed by site vistors. Trust level is something that may be very hard if not impossible to properly quantify. Yet all the Certificate Authorities, try to sell their certificates on the idea that they do in fact make your site more trustworthy.
This is why the news that browser developers agreeing on new security features is big news for webmasters and the certificate authorities. It could mean that there will be more diversity in the SSL Certificate market, and that perhaps more webmasters will be able to afford recognized SSL certificates for their smaller web sites, while at the same time the market can expand and grow beyond the limited number of sites today. After all everything else in the internet market has come down in price, why not SSL certificates.
Mozilla’s Frank Hecker offers his own thoughts on where Mozilla’s Policy on CA Certificates is going, and then discusses the business of Certificate Authorities and why the market has been stagnant. It’s a rather interesting read as to why SSL certificates are still rather expensive and why security means different things to different people.
