Q & A

Hosting simply makes your website visible to the traffic on the world wide web (www). To be a server on the Internet, it requires special equipment and a high speed connection, in order to provide reliable high speed access to the websites. You could think of hosting to your website as the telephone company is to your phone; they provide the dial tone for your telephone to connect to other telephones. Without a telephone company, your telephone could not connect to the telephone network; and without a hosting service, your website could not be visible to the world wide web. The hosting fee is much like your monthly telephone bill; it is based on the amount of storage (or space) your website requires, and the amount of bandwidth (how much traffic to your website) is requires. Typically; the more storage and bandwidth, the higher the price.

A domain name; ie, www.domainname.com, is simply a more human friendly way for people to be able to find your website. Each website can also be addressed by a unique I.P. (Internet Proticol) address. You have to purchase a domain name that you wish to use for your website. Your domain name will then be pointed to your unique I.P. address. Domain names are managed by name servers on the Internet. There is usually a short period of time for a new domain name to properly point to your website. This is referred to a propagation period and can take up to 48 hours to complete.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internets unique identifiers. You can visit and learn more at www.icann.org.

Ecommerce is generally referred to selling on the Internet. It is basically an on-line shopping cart that allows people (traffic) to go to a secure place, view your products and services, add them to a shopping cart, and checkout (purchase) using their credit card. A shopping cart is a specialized website that provides the tools needed to be able to open an on-line store. A shopping cart should not be confused with a website although there are similarities. A website is generally used to provide information about you, your company, your products and services, and/or general information. A potential customer would visit your website to learn about you, and then possibly visit your on-line store to make a purchase.

Search Engine Optimization has very blurred boundaries today, but it basically means organizing the content on a webpage to increase its potential relevance to search engines, with the ultimate goal of increasing traffic and visibility to your website. It involves proper descriptions and key word lists so that search engines can properly catalog the content of your website. It should also be noted that there are thousands of so called search engine optimization specialists standing in line waiting to take your money, all promising to deliver waves of traffic to your website. I would simply suggest caution before spending money to these types of businesses.

A search engine is simply an on-line tool to help you find the information you are looking for. You have to remember that they are in business to make a profit that is not a bad thing. They make money by charging companies who wish to gain more traffic to their website.

The simple answer is - YES. I don't generally recommend a client to edit their own website because there are so many things that can go wrong. Without knowing HTML, you could mess up your website, and in the long end up costing yourself more money to repair it. I would recommend taking a look at my Maintenance Plans and choosing an affordable option to fit your needs.

"Sites' positions in our search results are determined based on a number of factors designed to provide end-users with helpful, accurate search results. These factors are explained in more detail at http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html.

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages. For more information about improving your site's visibility in the Google search results, we recommend reviewing our webmaster guidelines. They outline core concepts for maintaining a Google-friendly website."