Home | Services | About | Contact

Web Site Overview

This brief overview explains some terms and concepts that influence the structure and costs associated with owning a website. A website is a group of web pages, usually of a common theme, that connect together by a series of links.

Owning a website takes for basic features:

Additional services

Domain Name

This how people find you on the internet. It is your address.

This website has the domain name 108tech.com

Domain names are hostnames that provide more memorable names to stand in for numeric IP addresses. They allow for any service to move to a different location in the topology of the Internet (or another internet), which would then have a different IP address.

  • a name that is entered into a computer and then looked up in the global DNS(Domain Name System) which informs the computer of the IP address(es) with that name.
  • the product that registrars provide to their customers.
  • a name looked up in the DNS for other purposes.
Generally you pay $10 to $15 per year to have your domain name. This includes having it sent to nameservers throughout the world so people can find your website.

Web Design

This is the look and feel of your site and how it works. It is the colors, shapes, text and images.

A website is a collection of information about a particular topic or subject. Designing a website is defined as the arrangement and creation of web pages that in turn make up a website. A web page consists of information for which the website is developed. On a different perspective, a webpage can be compared to a page in a book and a website is to a book. In planning design there are four main considerations:

  • Purpose - why is this site here?
  • Audience - who will come see it?
  • Content - what will they see or learn?
  • Accessibility - do the functions work?
Design prices vary. There are free sites (often worth less) and companies that will charge $100,000 for custom design - this is advertising after all. Most customers should decide what thier time is worth before embarking on a plan of designing thier own site.

Web Hosting

This is where the files that make up your website are kept so they can be found.

A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that provides individuals, organizations and users with online systems for storing information, images, video, or other content accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center.

This service generally runs $10 to $300 per month. Quality varies widely depending on sevice support and advertising rights. Colocation often runs into the $millions per year for large companies.

Content Management

If your web site never changed, you did not need to add any new content and every word you choose in the design process still sounds perfect, you would not need to consider content management. This rarely happens. One of the most useful aspects of a web site is the possibility to add new content. It can be a evolutionary process starting simple and leading to a wealth of information. I put content in three catagories:

  • Static information - contact information, organization history
  • Editable information - board members,
  • Dynamic informaton - current events, blogs, calendars

Web content cycle consists of different phases: create, update, publish, archive and retire. Fisrt, content is created by one or more authors. Over time that content may be edited. One or more individuals may provide some editorial oversight thereby approving the content for publication. Publishing may take many forms. Publishing may be the act of posting the content on the web or sending it out in a newsletter. At some point the content may become less relevant and archived for reference. If the content no longer applies it should be removed or retired.

Site maintenance and content management generally run $40 to $85 per hour billable in 15 minute segments. This cost can be significant if the site content is not properly planned. Blogs and some CMS's give users and opportunity to add content without using a designer.

Much has been written about web design and the many features possible on an internet site. I refer to Wikipedia for this basic explaination of web design. Wikipedia has an favorable copyright policy to allow this by making this content available according to the GNU Free Documentation License.