In the first few months of any business, financial resources is often the biggest constraints for most startups. Hence, entrepreneurs may want to design their own sites, and market the site themselves.

Before your site can be live on the internet, you must first register a domain name, subscribe to a hosting plan, design and upload your web pages to your server. We illustrate the steps as below:

1) Domain Name Registration:

The most popular domain names are .com domains. However, most .com domain names are likely to be taken up. Hence, you may want to consider .com.sg if you are a local Singapore startup company. you can check the availability of .com.sg at Singapore Network Information Centre. Now, .sg has been opened up for registration to the public so that there are more choices available. Requirements for registration of .sg is less stringent. We provide domain name registration at a cost of $55 for .com.sg and .sg domain names.

2) Web Hosting with Email:

After registering a domain name, the next step is to subscribe a web hosting plan. This essentially means that you are renting a small amount of space from a remote web server. The server will be located at a large datacenter, and it must be up and running most of the time. Having a web hosting plan allows you to upload your files to the server. The world cannot view your web site on your local computer. They can only see your site on a web server.

Nowadays, web hosting can be very affordable with many reliable web hosting companies around. Together, your web host will provide you an email solution. Email communication is one of the most important tools to operate a successful business online. You may also ask, "how much space do I need for my web site?" Normally, 100MB is more than enough for normal web sites. We also recommend that you subscribe to a server in the region that most of your customers as well as yourself will access the web site.

3) Web Designing:

Some web hosting company provides a ready made web design solution that comes with a template. These can be useful for novice designers. You may consider using macromedia dreamweaver/Ms frontpage to design your web pages. After designing your pages, you need to use FTP to upload your web pages to the remote server. FTP stands for file transfer protocol. It is a communication medium for you to upload files.

4) Online marketing:

When your web site is live on the internet, only a very small number of people will start to access your site. This is when you need to aggressively market your site, or else it will only sit there quietly and not generating sales. There are many marketing solutions available, and we have an article specially for"internet marketing solutions".

Article by Byon Ong, Singapore Business Resources for Entrepreneurs

January 2006

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