Small Office, Home Office Information

by Stuart Livesey

Every small business that has a site out there on the Net needs good web hosting. Sadly there are plenty of web hosts who promise the earth and deliver very little while there are others who offer a second rate service but camouflage it with a lot of spin.

So to help you choose a web host that is right for your small business here are 5 web hosting tips from our many years experience on the Net.

1. You get what you pay for. If all you want to pay is $5.00 a month then don’t expect an instant response if a problem arises.

2. Don’t settle for anything less than 24/7 email support. It’s a known fact that servers always crash at 3am on a Sunday morning and when it happens you want to be able to contact someone fast!. (We’ve seen hosts offering support via their message board - that’s just not good enough for any serious web host)

3. Don’t be fooled by anyone who tries to offer you 100% up time. It is simply impossible to guarantee anything like that at all.

4. Understand what 99% up time really means. There are 8,760 hours in every year; 99% of that is 8672.4 hours. That means you should expect your server to be down a total of 87.6 hours in any year so don’t be surprised if your server hiccups now and again.

5. Keep a mirror image of all the content that’s on your website on your office PC and back those files up to a CD at least every week. Also get your host to back up your sites every 24 hours with a retention period for those files of at least 24 hours.

by Stuart Livesey

1. If he wants you to agree to a splash page full of Flash run away as fast as you can. Splash pages are so last year. Besides splash pages are slow to load, annoy the crap out of prospective clients, do nothing for search optimisation and cost lots of money.

2. If he wants to include music run away almost as quickly as you would in point 1. Occasionally there is a good reason to have music on a web page but it’s rare and should never be played over and over again.

3. Ask your designer if he sees all surfers arriving at your site via the index page or arriving on your site via any of the pages on your site. If he tries to tell you that all your visitors will arrive via the index page find a new designer immediately. The one you’re talking to believes the eath is flat.

4. Ask you’re designer what he plans to do about search engine optimisation. If he tells you that it’s all about getting links or the only way to get traffic is by pay-per-click then you’re talking to another guy who believes the world is flat.

5. If your designer is going to arrange the purchase of your domain name make sure that it is registered in you’re name. Some designers will want to register it in their name and that means they have complete control over it. You might find that they never give it back to you.

by Stuart Livesey

Whether your small business already has a website or you’re thinking of having one developed for your small business here are five basic search engine optimisation rules you might like to think about.

1. Optimising for search engines starts at the design stage.

2. There are a million pages out there called home. Call your’s something relevant to your site and gain some advantage  in the  search  engines from it.

3. The ‘title’ for a web page is not the same as the title for a book or an article. Instead use it to attract surfers and search  engines. have a different title for each page on a website.

4. You don’t have to stuff your web pages with keywords or keyword phrases. Incorporate them into the text and links on your site in a perfectly natural way and they will still work fine.

5. He who has the most inbound links does not win. He who has relevant content and optimised pages has a much better chance of victory.