Decoding Website for Small Business

Starting a website has many benefits for your company, the website serves as the representation of your business on the world wide web. But for business owners, it's difficult for us to understand things about the process of website development. 

If you are looking for a simple guide that can teach you how to start a website for your small business. This article will help you understand the technical terminology simplified into layman's terms. 

What is the benefit of having a website for small businesses?

Having a website is a good form of advertisement for your products and services. It's like promoting them 24/7. If you have a good Search Engine Optimization on your website it can gain a pretty huge volume of organic traffic all around the world, and this can convert into sales for your business.

When a business has a website and online presence on the internet. It boosts the authority of your business to your clients. It gives them safety and assurance that your business is legitimate and serious in doing business.

By now, I think that you already know and are pretty convinced of the importance of a website in your small business. But I know that you have still doubt and are not yet confident in understanding the technical terms used by web developers or tech company who offers their service to build your website.

Here at Shoppiverse PH, we will help you to understand technical terms in web development so that you will understand what these web developers are talking about. Understanding before committing to website development for your company is very important.

First, let's begin by defining each technical term so that you as the business owner understand what these terms are all about.

Website 

The entire website is composed of web pages, images, audio, etc. that are hosted in the webserver by a web hosting company. Programmers build them using different programming languages like PHP, and javascript and sometimes they use the bootstrap framework to build them faster.

Domain Name 

The domain name is your address on the internet. This is the name you type in the browser address bar to go to our website. To give you an example our website domain name is www.shoppiverseph.com 

There are different type of domain name extension such as .com, .ph, .com.ph ,.org and many more. Some domain extensions are reserved for the government or branch of the military and cannot be used by businesses or any private person.  If you are planning to buy a dot ph domain you should expect that it cost much higher than the .com domain.

Web Hosting

When you say web hosting it means where your website resides or is being served. Typically you can purchase web hosting plans from different web hosting companies such as Amazon Web Services, GoDaddy, Bluehost, and Namecheap. Each of these companies has different hosting plans based on the budget of their client. 

Web Server 

Web servers are composed of different stacks of technology. Typically the webserver is either Apache or Internet Information Service (IIS). A database is being used to save data or content of websites such as the famous MySQL or the open-source MariaDB. While PHP is the scripting language used to interact with web pages and databases to save input from the client and perform functionality in web pages. 

The web server also refers to the specs of the computer used in serving your website. The higher the specs the faster your website will be served and the higher the number of visitors it can serve. 

But keep in mind that the higher the specs of your web server the higher the cost will be. So it is important to ask what is the right specs necessary and just enough based on the number of your client.

Webhosting Plan

Amazon Web Services, Godaddy, Namecheap, and  Interserver offer different web hosting plans. This is what it looks like. There are two common types of web hosting plans. Shared and Dedicated, shared hosting is good for small businesses because it's cheaper and can cater to the small volume of your client. But if your client grows or you are serving a web application that helps to simplify the process of your business you might need to upgrade your web hosting plan to a dedicated server.

As you can see in our example web hosting costs are different based on the plan. It can be monthly or annually. 

What is the initial cost of having a website in your business?

Although this variable comes into several factors. Such as the complexity of the functionality of the website. The more complex the functions and features of your website the longer it takes for the developer to build it.  The development cost will become higher compared to a basic static website.

 Another cost will be on web hosting and the domain name you will purchase. We already mentioned above that dot ph domain are more expensive than the .com domain. This is because the localized domain is favored by search engines to users who are browsing in your country. 

In summary:

Having a website in your business is an effective marketing strategy and can boost your product or service online 24/7. Nowadays websites can be built even without technical knowledge there are website creation services or tools that enable you to launch your website in a matter of minutes. There is an online website builder like Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress that is easy to use tools to build your company website. But if you are planning to have a website that has customer service or complex functionality it is better to let the expert build it for you.

When it comes to cost there is a pretty investment you need in order to build a website for your small business, by having a good website and expert people to build it for you, your business will reap its full benefits.