Frequently Asked Questions

Costs, domain names, and hosting

• Apart from building the website, what other costs are involved in getting a site going?
• Should I get a '.com' or a '.co.nz' (or other) domain name?
• Should I have my site hosted by my ISP or a specialist hosting service?
• What are the pros and cons of using my ISP's free/cheap hosting services?

Site content and preparation

• What should I do to prepare material for my new site?
• What sort of material (words and photos) should be included on my home page?
• How easy will it be to add more pages to my site once it's running?
• Why may my website look different on various browsers and screens?
• Can I personally update my own website content once it's up and running?
• Should I use PDFs or Word documents for text on my website, and if so, when?
• How wide should my web page be, to accommodate the variety of computer screen widths these days?

Search engines

• What can you do to help get my site listed on search engines?
• How can I be sure that my site will get visited and pay for itself?
• What are Search Engine Robots?
• What's the difference between are Search Engines and Web Directories?
• Why is my site listed in some directories under inappropriate categories?
• How does Google work and how can I improve my site's listing on it?
• Techwriter's own beginner's guide to how Google works

General

• How does my existing email address work via a website? Do I need a new address and ISP?
• What extra features, services and costs are required to upgrade my site to become capable of selling directly to visitors?

For existing website owners

• What types of digital cameras are 'best buys' for website and email work?
• What useful information is available in my website visitor statistics?
• How can you find out how many of your website's pages are indexed in Google?
• What can I do to get more inbound links into my site?
• How could a website newsletter strategy be implemented?
• My new website is not ranked in the top few pages of Google or other big search engines. What is going wrong?
• Is my website working for me? How can I tell? What could I do better?

(NOTE: There are heaps of other general questions and answers aimed at website owners, to be found on our Client FAQ area)

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