1. A foundation for a successful business website. Twitter: fpws 2. Anything well built needs a solid foundation. Physical building or structure A business website requires the same stability What are the keys we're going to discuss? Domain Ownership, Registration Web Hosting Development Platforms how your site is built. 3. Why are we discussing this? Client experiences over the years Examples Non Profit developer, wasn't responding, site needed major upgrade, developer had registered the domain for the client Property Developer Building frenzy, registering many domains, quickly releasing new property sites, customer contact is down sized, knowledge leaves, when he leaves. Demographic Reports Commerce Site contained 2000 US census data, needed to be upgraded to 2010, no documentation on site design, partner had left country with no contact, remaining partner left with valuable business, but in a complete mess. 4. Why are we discussing this? What seem like small details when starting out can become big problems and headaches in the future. You're ready to ramp up your online business but you run into these annoying little hiccups along the way. It's avoidable. 5. Domain Ownership Domains are virtual property = physical business property Domain registration information = business property lease or property deed. Questions that should be easy to answer Do I know exactly how many domains I have registered? Where did I purchase these domains? (GoDaddy, Network Solutions, etc.) Is the registration information current and accurate? 6. Domain Registration Details Business that owns this domain Domain Administration Contact Domain technical contact 7. Where problems can happen. Purchasing SSL Move site to new hosting provider Add new service where you need to make DNS record changes, moving email to 3rd party provider like Gmail or AppRiver 8. Website hosting Comes in all shapes and sizes. Most use shared hosting plan, GoDaddy, Web.com, Network Solutions. These days most accounts come with a management panel, Cpanel or Plesk. Hosting account will either be a Linux based account or Windows hosting account. 9. Web Hosting 101 Who is your provider? Do you have the most current account credentials (username and password) Do you know how to contact support? Does support require a verification value like a PIN or answer to a secret question? Do you have a Linux or Windows hosting account? Is your account a shared hosting, virtual private server or dedicated server? Does my hosting provider also host my email service? 10. Web hosting problems Your site is currently hosted by the developer who you want to move away from. The service of the hosting provider has dropped and the site has been going down. Your web traffic has out grown the resources allotted in a shared hosting account. You want to do a complete rebuild of your website using new web site technology. 11. Website Development Platforms Great variety of ways your website could be built. Static HTML pages Content Management Systems WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and others E-Commerce platform OsCommerce, Shopify, Magento and many others Custom Designed website PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, Cold Fusion, Ruby on Rails 12. Website Development Platforms What should I know and have documented? What type of site do we currently have? Is it a CMS or a custom made website? If it's a CMS or E-Commerce platform what is version are we using? Have we customized the tool to meet our needs beyond what is available out of the box or with other modules? What programming language do we use? What database application do we use? 13. Website Development Platform What problems can arise? Need to work with a new website designer. The platform that we currently use could be out of date and in need of an update for security, new features or other reasons You want to do more with your site, drive more traffic to it or automate portions of your business and the platform might not be flexible enough for what you need to do. 14. In Conclusion When you stop and think about it, what we discussed is not a challenge. It's time. It's easily put off and becomes a high importance item when we really don't want it to be. Take the time to lay a solid foundation and you'll have what you need in place to build a well established web property. 15. Contact Information Aaron LaMontagne FocusPoint Web Solutions Walpole, NH 603-756-2893 aaron@focuspointwebsolutions.com Www.focuspointwebsolutions.com Twitter: fpws