Domain registration was opened up to commercial competition several years ago. There are now dozens of commercial domain registrars in the US and other countries around the world. Unfortunately the quality, reliability, and pricing varies considerably among the various domain registrars. We normally use Dotster (www.dotster.com) and have found their cost and level of service to be quite good. A number of our customers use GoDaddy and we have found GoDaddy to be reliable and reasonably priced.

If you ask us to register your new domain, we would check to see if the name was available (i.e. no one else has previously registered it) and then we would arrange registration such that you and your organization are listed as the owner and ourselves as the technical contact. The registrar will typically charge around $15 per year and one can register for multiple years. The price may vary depending on what TLD (top level domain) you are registering. Examples of TLDs are .com, .org, .net, .info, .edu.

Each website must have a unique domain name (e.g. salemdesign.com) and this name must be registered in order for it to be found by web browser over the Internet.

There is a master register (essentially an index) which contains the name, who owns that name, and the numerical IP address of the server (a computer) on which it resides. Copies of this master register are kept on hundreds of other servers (called domain name servers or DNS) around the world. It can take up to 72 hours for a new registration (or changes in an existing one) to propagate to all the DNS servers. In general, your local DNS servers are maintained by your ISP (Internet Service Provider). For example, we connect to the internet using Verizon DSL, so all our machines (and browsers) look to the Verizon DNS servers to find a target website.

• You need a clear idea of what you or your organization are trying to accomplish. If you are a non-profit (e.g. an art association or a little league) then you may want the website to publicize your organization and/or communicate (events, schedules, announcements) with your members. If you run a small business you may want to publicize your products or services more widely. If you are an individual artist, you may want to use the website as an online portfolio of your art… Or you may want to publicize your work to the whole world.
• You need good, interesting, useful, appealing content. The website is ultimately about you and your organization, products, services, art, whatever and you have to give us good descriptive text, drawings, photographs that we can use to get that across to the people that will visit the site.
• You need to get your website listed elsewhere on the web, e.g. local business directories or art associations. This helps with getting your website found by people surfing the web. We will help get the site indexed by the search engines but these sort of incoming links help your rankings with the search engines.
• You need to read and respond to your email. People do not expect an instantaneous response to an email but they do expect one within 12 to 24 hours.

You need to have a good business model to start with. A website is not a magic bullet. The most successful websites we have built were for customers who had already established that there was a market for their products or services. The website then substantially increased their business.

Make sure we get things right the first time. We need a single person in your organization to be our point of contact. Carefully proof read all information that you want us to include in the web site. Ensure that everyone who needs to review the design or content has done so before you ask us to start work. It is much more efficient if you provide all written content for the web site as electronic files (e.g. Microsoft Word, ASCII text, or Excel spreadsheets).

We test newly developed websites using the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer (currently 6.x) for Windows, Mozilla Firefox 1.x for Windows and Macintosh OS X, and Apple Safari for Macintosh OS X. We no longer test against Internet Explorer for Macintosh OS X since Microsoft is no longer developing IE for the Mac. We also validate our XHTML and CSS code using the W3C organization validation tools.

This does mean that newly developed sites may not work well with older browser versions. But almost all of the major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, Safari) can be upgraded to the latest version for free. In fact, if you are properly keeping up with your Windows XP or Windows 2000 OS updates, you are automatically being updated to the latest and greatest Internet Explorer.