Category: Web Development

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Make A Website For Your New Small Business

Recently find yourself unemployed and starting a new business? Setting up a website for your doesn’t have to be overly complicated or expensive. As a technology consultant, I often help business owners navigate their options, and I’ve found that the key is matching your technical comfort level with the right approach. Let’s break down the main paths you can take.

The simplest route is using a website builder. The most popular is Squarespace. Others include Wix and Weebly. These platforms offer what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editors, which means you can drag and drop elements onto your pages without touching any code. You’ll pay a monthly fee (typically $20-35), but this includes hosting, security updates, and customer support. The trade-off? Less flexibility in terms of customization, but for many small businesses, the pre-built templates and features are more than adequate.

For those willing to invest a bit more time in exchange for greater control, hosting your own WordPress site is worth considering. WordPress powers about 40% of all websites for good reason – it’s versatile and has a massive ecosystem of themes and plugins. You’ll need to arrange your own hosting (typically $5-25 monthly) and handle updates, but you’ll have more freedom to customize your site. Many hosting providers offer “one-click” WordPress installation, making the initial setup fairly straightforward.

A middle ground that’s gaining popularity is using managed WordPress hosting from providers like Kinsta. (I personally suggest against using WP Engine since they’ve been hostile to WordPress). These services combine the flexibility of WordPress with the hands-off maintenance of website builders. While more expensive than basic hosting (starting around $30 monthly), they handle security, updates, and performance optimization for you. This option makes sense if you want WordPress’s capabilities but prefer not to deal with technical maintenance.

Remember, your choice doesn’t have to be permanent. Many businesses start with a simple website builder and migrate to a more customized solution as they grow. The most important thing is getting online with a professional-looking site that you can manage within your budget and technical abilities.

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Fastmail

People often ask me what the best and cheapest way is to set up a custom domain email, not just your standard free google.com email. You can of course pay Google, but I’m not a big fan of their interface or snooping on your email to better advertise to you.

I personally use Fastmail. It’s professional, fast, reliable, and has a nice web interface. If you’re interested, my referral code for 10% off your first year is here:

https://ref.fm/u28299296

There used to be a few decent free options, but as Google has started charging, so have the others.

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VisualPing.io

Do you ever need to check if a website changes? I use an automated site checker for this such as visualping.io. What’s this useful for?:

  • If you’re watching a product’s availability on a site, for example to buy a hard-to-find item such as a popular game console.
  • If you need to see if data or text changes on sites for your job, for whatever information is contained on those pages; this could be for data analysis or competitive research.
  • If you have your own website and want to see if it goes down for any reason.

There are probably many more reasons to check websites. Visualping and other sites make money by having you pay if you need checks more frequently than every day. There used to be many PC-installed software tools for this purpose, but this has largely moved to the cloud, which I think makes sense for simplicity and ease of use.

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How to Sell Domain Names

Got some unused domain names that you believe have value? Selling those domains rather than just letting them expire can be tricky. There are a lot of domain auction and resale sites on the internet but we believe only one approach is above the rest.

 

Afternic.com is one of the most popular domain selling services. The key is to use their Premium Promotional Level.  This allows your domain to appear on other domain sites for sale along with unowned domains.  In order for this to work, you must also set a Buy Now price.  This premium level is only available with certain domain name registrars.  We highly recommend hover.com.  Once afternic confirms you are the domain owner, your domain will then appear on many sites when people are searching for domain names to buy.

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Use Google Email with your Domain

Google email works with name@gmail.com, but you could also use name@yourcompany.com. To do this, you sign up for Google Apps, which is offered in Standard (Free) and Premier Editions. Go to: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/

There are a couple of ways to do this:

The simplest is to choose “I want to buy a domain” which allows you to buy a domain through Google (which actually uses GoDaddy as the registrar and costs $10/month), which provides you a domain pre-configured to use Google services.

The other method is to use your existing domain or purchase from domain registrar service and assign the MX records to Google. Your DNS Manager or Domain Manager page from your registrar would then look like this:

The second method requires that you also verify that you own the domain by updating the cname record or uploading a file to the domain.

After pointing your MX records to Google, you can get your email by going to:

https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomainname.com
..where yourdomainname.com is actually your domain name.

Because that’s a long address, I typically set up a URL pointer so that mail.yourdomainname.com will point to the above address. This is also handled in the DNS management page at your domain registrar. The URL pointing would look like this:If your registrar’s DNS management system does not allow such a redirect, then you can set up a redirect from your website, for example from yourdomainname.com/mail/.