Tips

These pages give tips and information to think about as you consider what you want in a website, email, and more.

(We'll be adding to this page. Please come back...)

1. Free vs. paid - There are lots of free services out there -- especially if you'd like a blog. There are also lots of low-priced services -- for example, the $3.99/month package at 1&1. What are the tradeoffs?
2. Paying a few dollars per month for a website can also give you lots of free email addresses. Here are uses for multiple email addresses -- including some surprising ones, like foiling phishers and spammers.
3. Two articles from Entrepreneur.com can help you choose a name. Both of these will help non-businesses too:
   • Naming Your E-Business
   • Protecting Your Business Name Online discusses names that conflict.
   Cyber-squatters may be holding the domain name that's right for you, trying to force you to pay a high fee to buy the name they currently own. ICANN policies about domain disputes explain the rules. This New York Times article covers a court case against one cybersquatter.
4. Helping people find your site, and finding what they want on your site, isn't automatic. It takes understanding and planning as you design. We'll help you, of course! But here are two websites with lots of background:
   • Search 101, a guide to making your website rank highly on Google and friends (from Search Engine Watch)
   • Usability.gov is a US Government website with lots of information -- maybe too much for building a small website. Check the free downloadable book with recent research and guidelines.
5. If you collect information about your visitors, it's good (and may be required by law) to post a privacy policy that explains how you'll handle their information. If you sell products or downloadable files, people will want to know their rights, your warranty, and so on. One place to start is by searching the Web for information and examples of what other sites do. FreeNetLaw.com has free legal notices and other advice.
6. You don't need to understand HTML or CSS, the languages of the Web, to make a website. (We may use some of it to help you tweak your site.) For the technical and the brave among you, though, here's a handy HTML reference from W3Schools.