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A good support staff is an extremely valuable if not totally indispensable resource for a new website owner. Unfortunately it is also a resource that very few free website providers offer.
Would you like to know how to determine whether a web design company has a good support staff before you purchase your website? Simply email the seller these two simple questions.
1. How do I setup links on my site?
2. What software will I need to manage my site?
If you don’t get a response to your questions within 24 to 48 hours, look elsewhere for your website. If the only answers you receive are an offer to setup the links for you for a small fee and a list of expensive software products, look elsewhere for your website.
A good support staff will respond to your request within 24 to 48 hours. A good support staff will offer to setup links on your site for you for a small fee--and provide you with a list of links to free
software you can use to manage your site. The list will probably include some optional software products you may find useful for the management of your site. The key words here are free and optional. An excellent support staff will tell you up front whether a product is optional or not.
The two software products you absolutely must have to manage your website are a good text editor and FTP program. Any support staff worth their salt will tell you that there are several free text editors with WISIWIG (what you see is what you get) capabilities
available on the internet. These editors are an excellent choice for those of you who don’t know HTML. The staff will also tell you that there you can get free FTP programs as well. An excellent support staff will offer advice similar to the advice given in the following paragraph:
"We would be more than happy to set up your links. However, with a good WISIWIG text editor, you can easily set up your links yourself even if you don’t know HTML. Refer to the help section for "hyperlinks" in your WISIWIG text editor to learn how to use this
feature on your editor. By the way, if you don’t know HTML, it’s actually an extremely easy language to learn. There are free HTML tutorials available on the internet. In case you're interested, here is a link to the tutorial we recommend..."
A domain is an extremely valuable asset; you should most definitely have one of your very own. Without a domain of your own, you may as well save yourself the time and trouble of trying to start
an online business at all. The average cost of a .com domain is approx $8.95 per year. You’ll find that some web design companies will include your domain with your professionally designed website at no extra charge.
If you are planning to use a free provider, then don’t bother purchasing a domain for your new site unless you intend to shell out the provider’s membership fee. Most free providers provide you with
two membership options—free or paid. If you choose the free membership option, the provider will set up your URL for you website like this: FREE PROVIDER DOMAIN/YOUR USER ID, or even worse, like this:
FREE PROVIDER DOMAIN/DIR/YOUR USER ID. Settle for either one these URLs, and you’ll be lucky to even get your site indexed by the search engines and directories at all. You see, many search engines and directories will not accept your website submissions if your URL contains a
forward slash. Some major search engines and directories categorically ref use to accept submissions for websites hosted with free providers at all. Google rarely indexes sites hosted by free providers, and even more rarely gives the site a ranking greater than 0/10.
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