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Getting Started - Online Resources for Small Business

Marketing Minds has a number of preferred suppliers which may be of interest to companies looking for online service providers. These cover the three essential areas for getting online: registering a website name ("domain name registration"), finding a good company to run your website ("hosting services"), and moving from using generic consumer email to email services which allow you to have email addresses that reflect your your own company name or domain name.

Website Domain Name Registration

Established businesses often need many website domain names - perhaps for the different brand they offer, for specific promotions, or as part of particular marketing campaigns.

Finding a good website address can drive the choice of name for a brand, product or company itself. Because of the vast number of domain names which have already been reserved by other people this is not an easy task.

GoDaddy.com is the world’s #1 ICANN-accredited domain name registrar. The Go Daddy Group has over 5 million customers with more than 28 million domains under management, and has been ranked #20 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500.

Despite a somewhat unusual but memorable name (they know how to market, like to sponsor NASCAR and run ads at the US Super Bowl), GoDaddy is a very reputable company with nearly 2,000 employees. Their specialty is domain name registration at prices which are hard to beat.

GoDaddy have a well set-up and very usable online system for finding the right domain name for you, and for managing the ones you own. Many kinds of domain name are available from GoDaddy, including:

	Global domains	.com .net .org .biz .info
	Region-specific	.eu .asia
	Country-specific	.co.uk .cn .de .jp .us .tw
	Content-specific	.tv .jobs .me
	Mobile domains	.MOBI Domains (for sites targeting mobile and smart phone users)

Australian domain names (.com.au) can only be issued to businesses active in Australia. An Australian Business Number (ABN) must be supplied as part of the domain name registration process. We use MelbourneIT for Australian domain name registration.

Find your .com.au domain name using the search box below.

Web Hosting Services

Apart from a domain name, you also need somewhere to run your website.

You could run a website on your own computer (if it is permanently connected to the internet, and you've all the software and know-how), but for most businesses and individuals it will be best to use one of the many website hosting services.

A good web hosting service will offer a secure, fast, and continually available service for your website. They will also keep things simple as possible for you and must not make technical and management matters sound more complicated than they are.

In addition to registering domain names GoDaddy.com site hosting plans are very affordable and particularly good for individuals and novice website owners wanting to set-up simple sites.

Businesses and people wanting more flexibility (eg to easily run your own WordPress blog on the site, or set up an online store) will probably find WestHost's website hosting services both easier and much more flexible (you can also register domain names through WestHost).

We like WestHost for website hosting. They are a very professional company with an excellent reputation for service. WestHost's world-class data centre serves over 65,000 web sites and is designed to deliver secure, fast and reliable service. Most important - their service staff are very helpful, and if you find yourself with a really successful website WestHost has the capacity you'll need to cope with huge growth.

One of the biggest differences you'll find with WestHost is their breadth of included services. They combine everything you'll need to get your business up and running online, and offer support for just about anything else you can think of.

Email Services

It looks unprofessional to run a business using email accounts from generic internet companies with email addresses like sue.brown@gmail.com, sue.brown@yahoo.com or john.smith@bigpond.com. It is much better to have an email address which is the same as your website domain name. This also extends your branding into all your communications.

Depending on the web hosting provider you use, you may get many free email accounts (as with WestHost), or you may need to pay extra for some fixed number of email accounts (email is normally extra with GoDaddy).

Just like web sites, the business of "owning" an email address is separate from how and where you have your email service hosted.

Importantly, once you own a website domain name (eg www.ibm.com) you automatically own all the associated email addresses (eg ann.employee@ibm.com, accounts_payable@ibm.com, webmaster@ibm.com, etc). What you don't automatically get is the computer resources to run the email services, or the disk space, internet bandwidth, and spam-filtering services you will need to actually use your email.

These services are associated with your web hosting service provider, not the domain name registration company. So... it is quite normal to register your domain names with one company (eg GoDaddy), and have your website and email hosted by another company (eg WestHost).

You don't have to split them up - it's often simpler not to. But particularly if you have several domain names you might find it best to use separate domain registration and hosting service providers. The choice is yours.

Online Newsletters and Email Marketing

For businesses who wish to stay in touch with their customers, one of the most common and productive marketing tools is email newsletters and promotions.

A professional-grade email program which we like is 1-2-All Email Marketing

It is well-suited for integration within quite sophisticated web sites, and provides excellent management of subscriber lists, opt-in and opt-out requests, and fully-customisable data records (which will help you target mail-outs more accurately). Importantly, 1-2-All enables you to fully support anti-spam best practices.

Technically, the application integrates with MySQL databases, and is written in PHP. (Most professional web hosting companies such as WestHost support these commonly-used features).

Keep Control of Your Website

When web designers and other online services companies offer assistance with setting up a new website, be sure that they register the site in your name, not theirs. They should also give you all the account management details (usually just a matter of forwarding one or two emails). You might not understand or need the account management details at the moment, but if you need to change web designer you will be glad you have them!

We have been seeing people register sites for their clients in the web-designer's name.

Make sure you have details of:

The domain registrar your domain name (URL) is registered through (eg GoDaddy).
The domain name username and password
Your account number with the domain registrar, and the user name and password for the registrar's account management web page.

Almost worse than this, we have seen web developers take advance payment from people they are going to develop a site for but not registering the site until they are ready to load all their code up onto it. The client has the impression that they have registered their website (just because they told the web developer to go and do it), but because the web developer has not done anything, someone else could come along and take ownership of the domain name.

The best solution is for small business owners to choose and register their website names themselves. This is quite easy, should not cost more than the cost of a nice bottle of wine, and gives you full control.

More on how to register website domain names.

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