TetNet - Web site design & hosting

Below are a compilation of questions commonly asked of TetNet related to web site design, marketing, hosting and the internet in general.

Hosting
	What is a domain name? A domain name is a unique alpha-numeric name used to identify a particular computer (i.e. Web server or mail server) on the Internet. Domain names allow Internet users to type in a name, such as mybrand.com, to identify a numeric address such as 209.67.50.203. The purpose of domain names is to allow ordinary users connected to the Internet to find Web sites and send email to addresses with familiar names such as "mybrand.com" or "register.com" without having to memorize the numerical addresses that actually locate the computers or servers ons the Internet. How many characters and what characters can a registered domain name include? Domain names have a variety of basic rules. .COM - to be used for commercial and personal sites .NET - recommended for companies involved in Internet infrastructure .ORG - recommended for not-for-profit organizations Use only letters, numbers, or hyphen ("-") Cannot begin or end with a hyphen Must have less than 63* characters, not including .COM, .NET and .ORG * .com, .net and .org domain names exceeding a total of 26 characters are supported by most web browsers. However, certain web browsers, email programs and other Internet related applications may not support domain names over 26 characters. There are also country code domains, for example .CA (for Canada), .GR (Greece). Each of these has particular rules for registration. Contact TetNet for further details.
Web sites
	What should we place on our home page? Your home page should be clean and simple. Remember, sometimes less is more. It should say who you are, what you do, and what you have to offer the visitor. Give them something that they can buy into immediately; that is, grab their attention. When you have got their attention, then you can direct them to the pages with all the interesting graphics toys and gimmicks. We suggest you don't try to overload them with too much detail on the home page. Should I have lots of graphics and photographs my site? It depends: How long does the site take to load? What speed connections do your target audience use? Are they all business users with ADSL/ISDN links to the Internet? If that's the case, then lots of graphics are good. But if you are trying to get to Mom and Pop (Silver surfers) using a 14.4K modem in their study somewhere in the boonies with bad telephone lines, then a different approach to design is needed. Always consider the target audience and their environment. At TetNet we can modify your images or create new ones that are tailored for the net to maximize on image quality and minimize file size to decrease downloading time. What are some web architecture considerations? If your visitors want to find information, let them have it easily. If you have many things to offer, perhaps consider building a search engine on your site to reduce the time taken to find what they are looking for. Make your navigation easy and intuitive. What is electronic commerce? Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is any commercial activity conducted over networks linking electronic devices (mainly computers) including commercial transactions conducted by Internet, telephone and fax, electronic banking and payment systems, trade in digitized goods and services, and electronic purchasing and restocking systems. The Internet has opened up networking to anyone with a computer and Internet access. Once you're hooked up, you can buy, sell, and connect with the people who matter to you: your own employees (in the next office or three thousand kilometres away), your suppliers, your customers, your bank accounts, your credit information services, your sources of market information, and so on. How can I secure my Web site and transactions on the Internet? The type of security you will need for your Web site depends on what kind of use it will have. Once you determine use, you can identify the types of threats you will need to protect yourself against. For example, if you will be doing online sales using credit cards, you will need to protect the credit card information from being intercepted, both during the transaction and when it is stored on the server. Similarly, if you have confidential customer information, you will also want to ensure that this information is not accessible. It is useful to note, however, that in many instances, doing online credit card sales can be more secure than in a traditional environment, where much of the credit card fraud is caused by the people involved in the transaction, or by the theft of receipts. There are a number of security options, from firewall software, to secure servers, to Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), SET and public key infrastructure. TetNet can provide you with more information on these solutions, and whether they are right for your site.
Web Marketing
	What's the difference between a search engine and an index? A search engine (ex., Altavista) is a database of webpages. You give them your URL, and they read your page, extract relevant information from it, and store it in their database. Many search engines also run "spiders" that roam around the net looking for new pages. An index (ex., Yahoo, Open Directory) is a database of web sites. Your listing in an index depends on what you tell them in your submission, not what is on your page. What key words should I use for my site? Consider key phrases instead. The easiest way to do this is ask yourself "what would someone trying to find me type in when they search?" Make a list of these. Try them out on the search engines -- pretend to be someone looking for your product or service. If your business is geographically restricted, then your keyphrases should reflect this. Additional tips, in terms of your web site content: All your most important keyphrases should be in the TITLE tag. Don't repeat a keyphrase, and don't repeat any individual word more than 5 times or so. The reason why you don't want to repeat any particular word more than 5 times is that some search engines may penalize you for doing this. It isn't likely that this will happen if you exceed 5, but play it safe. The exception is common "noise" words like "the", "in", "a", "and" and so on. Most search engines ignore them. The first paragraph of your home page should recapitulate and expand upon everything in your title and meta tags. You need to have all those keyphrases in it. However, since this is going to be read by people, it needs to be written with them in mind. This is where you introduce yourself to your visitors, so you want to make a good impression. Some "experts" advise trying to trick search engines by putting keyphrases in comments, putting them in text that is the same color as your background, and so on. We strongly advise that you not try these tricks. Bluntly, most of them don't work -- and the ones that do may stop working at any minute, as the search engines are constantly trying to detect and defeat them. Once you have your pages up and running, and chock full of useful content, it's a very good idea to try and get other people to link to them. It's not enough to just get them in the search engines. There are three very good reasons for doing this: First, many search engines are now using link popularity (how many other pages link to your page) as a ranking criteria -- they figure that if other sites link to your page, it might be useful. Second, it's recently been revealed that Inktomi applies a ranking penalty to any url submitted through their free "Add URL" system, but removes it if their spider also finds the page by following a link from another site (they do this in an attempt to find and penalize "doorway" pages). And third, you'll get traffic from the websites that link to you. How long will it take my site to be listed by search engines? Consider that there are about 7.5 million new pages per day being put onto the internet, so your chances of getting listed quickly are rather slim and the time taken to get listed will become longer and longer. On average sites can take from 2 weeks to 4 months to be listed. If we use Flash on our web site, will it be effective for search engines to find my site? In our experience a lot of search engines seem to have a major problem indexing Flash sites if additional HTML coding is not added to the website to enhance search engine indexing. We can advise you on how best to do this when TetNet is constructing your web site. Doing this should enable your site to be effectively spidered.

TetNet, 360A Bloor Street W., P.O. Box 68507, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3C9 Canada
Tel: (416) 463-9995