Small Business Web Hosting: How To Choose The Best Provider

You’ll find small business web hosting all over the Internet and each plan is a little bit different. They’ll vary greatly in their fee structures but price shouldn’t be your only consideration. It’s more important to look at the services they offer first. Your website is going to be one of your most important business assets. You need to make sure you have reliable hosting.

Look for a dedicated server: You’ll see less expensive small business web hosting plans that offer you shared hosting. Avoid this, it’s not really a bargain.

Instead, look for a plan with a dedicated server. With shared hosting someone else is in control of your hosting and even if they offer you the moon now they could change their minds later. You’ll have less bandwidth, fewer features and the customer service is usually poor quality. Pay the few dollars extra for a dedicated account.

Buy your own domain name: Some hosting plans will offer you a free domain name which sounds pretty good until you read all the fine print. Then you find out that they actually own the name and if you try to move your hosting you have to leave your domain name behind. Always buy your own domain name and point the domain name servers at your hosting account.

Look for disk space: Your disk space determines how much content you can publish online. Most plans will offer you a minimum of 100M and, unless you’re going to be building out a huge site, that’s generally more than enough. Don’t be suckered into paying for more disk space unless you’re really going to need it. And don’t worry. If you do decide later on that you need more disk space, a quality provider will be able to upgrade your account without disrupting your website.

Single vs multiple domains: Most small business are only going to set up one site on one domain name. Even if you include extra pages like sales pages or landing pages, you’ll still be attaching them to your site as sub-domains. So a smaller hosting plan that only offers one domain is fine.

However, if you plan to set up more than one website or use more than one domain name you’ll want a larger plan that allows you to set up multiple domains. Typically, your choice will be either one or unlimited domains so don’t worry about looking for anything smaller.

Customer support: Look for a reputable hosting company that offers reliable, 24/7 customer support. And if they have live chat support available, that’s even better. While the bigger hosting companies will guarantee you your website will be up and running 99.9% of the time, there’s always the possibility that something could happen. Using a service that has round-the-clock support is the most important feature to look for in your small business web hosting.

Category: Web Hosting / Tags: , , ,

Following Web Development Life Cycle for Effective Solutions

There is a rising demand of professional web development firms to design and develop a solution that can do wonders for a business. Therefore, there is a need to hire a reliable and experienced company that is capable to provide quality solutions. Before you get in touch with one of the firms, you must have little knowledge about web development services.

Although a web consultant will provide all the details related to the project, but you must have basic knowledge about web app development process. Yes, even a web development solution has to undergo various steps to ensure accuracy, quality and efficiency for a business organization. The steps involved in web application development lifecycle are as follows:

1. Requirements Gathering: The web developer must understand the requirements in detail and put down all the requirements together to leave no space for errors. The details covered in this step involve the concept, purpose of developing a site, its marketing objectives, target market, competitors, expectations from the website and so on.

2. Detailed Analysis: Once the requirements are listed down, these are thoroughly analyzed to prepare a development plan that can be achieved in a set time period.

3. Website Design: The design should not only be attractive but should also portray the vision of the company. Therefore, prior discussion is important to decide all the factors to be included in advance to streamline the entire development process.

4. Technology: There is wide range of technologies used to make the web app development solution successful. Once you analyze the requirements, you will also be sure of the technology to be used in your web solution.

5. Coding: By using the right technology and scripting language, the codes are written to make the site functional. At this stage, the web developers use their skills and knowledge to write the correct codes to reduce bugs in the solution.

6. Testing: Although testing is processed side-by-side to ensure quality in the solution, but it is thoroughly checked again before project deployment. The quality assurance team checks every element and feature of the website to eliminate the defects and rectify the identified errors to provide complete satisfaction

7. Project Deployment: After thoroughly tested, the website is deployed to make it go live on the internet.

Although project deployment is the last step for a web development solution, but the process is still incomplete without regular maintenance. It is important to take web maintenance services to keep your website in order. Moreover, timely website updates with latest features is also vital to provide the best services to the customers.

So, you can now get in touch with a web application development company to follow a similar type of life cycle to design an effective solution for your company.

Category: Web Development / Tags: , ,

Website Design, Content and Legal Considerations in the Medical Practice

Look who’s searching…

In today’s medicine, the web and social media are important and beneficial tools that should not be ignored. According to an article from amednews on Feb. 21, 2011, “New vital sign: degree of patient’s online access” by Pamela Lewis Dolan, searching for health information is the third most common online activity behind checking e-mail and using a search engine, with women more likely than men doing healthcare research.

A Harris survey conducted in January 2011 on behalf of Insider Pages, an online directory that has a “physician finder,” found that most people look for physicians based solely on their location. Patients starting with a physician finder normally do a query on physicians in a particular geographic area, and once that is generated, the patients will click on the profiles of the physicians they are interested in. This is then normally followed by the searching the profile page and then the physician’s personal web page if they wanted more information. The survey also noted that even though not all adults go online, the percentage of online health information seekers is at 59% of the total U.S. population.

Designed for Success…

In considering web design/medical website development, you should carefully consider what type of audience you want to attract. You may want to attract a certain type of patient, specific to your specialty, which will dictate how your design and website should be promoted. A plastic surgeon would certainly want to promote beautiful photos of before and after surgical procedure pictures, whereas a pediatrician may want to promote an “ask-a-nurse” component or brightly colored home page. Another consideration is the actual design. If you aren’t sure what type of design you would like to promote the practice, do some research and find other practices online in your same specialty.

“Googling” the simple phrase “Family Practice” for instance, will provide hundreds of practices with an online presence. Review them, making helpful notes to assist you in design. What was the first thing that caught your eye on their site? Did it seem professional? Were there any “special” effects such as flash animation, special links or other features you would like to incorporate in your website? Did the website allow patient interaction with the providers? How were the physicians highlighted in the website? Is it easy for the patients to navigate? Did they have a pleasing home page, highlighting the practice with easy to read information? Keeping a list of website links that contained special designs, features or undesirable attributes will help down the road when designing your home page or speaking to the web designers if you decide to use a professional service.

In respect to website content, this is obviously going to be specific to your practice and specialty. Some items to keep in mind globally would be using your practice name, address, phone number and any other means of contacting the office on each page. If you can, include a map for patients to find your location and a link to such as “MapQuest” or “Google Maps” that will allow the patient to print out directions to your practice.

Keeping the content fresh and updated is also a good idea for visitors to return. Information about sunburns isn’t really relative in the Midwest during a February snowstorm. If you are using a professional web design company, they will question you for interest in SEO or “search engine optimization” which is normally an additional fee to site design. By using the design company, they will “promote” your website by SEO optimization, which is done by paying special attention to descriptions and keywords making sure that your scores rate higher in ranking in search results.

There are many free analysis tools to track your site’s SEO performance, such as Yahoo! Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, SEO Book and SEO Chat that will give you a wide range of options to follow your SEO campaigns.

Legally Speaking…

Using a website for your practice is treated as advertising under the law, so any legal and ethical rules of advertising for physicians should be applied. One should also take into consideration any patient-physician-practice contact and the legal ramifications under HIPAA (Health Insurance and Portability and Accountability Act) and ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) standards.

Category: Web Designs / Tags: , , ,