Checklist for Taking Your Business Online

Note: Information for this section provided by DBTECH, INTERNET SERVICES.

Website Costs

There are a few sunk costs when getting your business online. These incude:

Domain name registration. Usually $10-20 per year. This is the fee paid to the agency for the right to have your domain name for a period of time.
Hosting. Usually $5-100 per month, depending on usage. This is the fee charged for housing your website files on a web server with a high-speed link to the internet, usually at an ISP.
Website Design and Development. Anywhere from free to the sky is the limit. This is whatever you pay an individual or agency to create the look and feel of your site as well as any functionality that it will entail.

What is the cost of the service?
Can you get an itemized quote with no hidden charges?
How much disk space/bandwidth will you receive? (the more the better)
What kind of support does the company provide?
Do they offer a way to manage your own email addresses?
Do they create periodic backups of your website files and databases?
Do they have multiple backbone connections into the Internet? (Ask how much downtime they have had.) Your Provider should have multiple, redundant lines.
Will you get reports that tell how many visitors you have, and where they came from, and which pages they came to?
What kind of security do they provide to keep your information safe from hackers?
How fast is their network? A good Provider should keep approximately 50 percent of their lines free in order to handle peak times smoothly.

Clean, uncluttered and easy to navigate throughout the Site
Fast downloading time (which means that you should not have large photos)
Keep the "look" consistent on each page, so that the visitor will know that they are still on your site

In addition to reliable tech support, does the provider offer marketing support in order to help drive traffic to your Site? This can also be done through an outside marketing agency.
After all, a website is the beginning, not the end of your Internet journey. A professional Provider should be as interested in your success as they are in designing and/or hosting your Site.