Design Process
Site by You have arrived at “hidden” web pages relating to the company activities of the late Peter Dentener. Peter passed away on 24 September 2005 and Adecron Ltd no longer offers the services relating to his skills. Text has been maintained for the time being to reflect Peter’s input in the past and because links still exist from several of the websites he designed. For more info on Adecron’s current activities check out www.adecron.co.nz
Things you should know about
Below are a number of things you should know about when building a web site. If this is too technical for you or you would rather let us deal with this, we will discuss the different options with you and take care of it too, leaving you to get on with running your business.
Domain name
When you set up your business, you give it a name that either reflects what the business is about, or a name you like. Of course when you buy an existing business, you use the name the previous business owner gave it, or you rename/rebrand.Your web site also needs a name, and this is called a domain name. Having your own domain name (such as www.yourbussines.co.nz) is especially important for businesses because that is what your visitors see when they type in your web site address or click on a link to reach your site. If you do not have a domain name, your address may look like www.yourISP.co.nz/freesites/yourname/. Of course this may not be an issue if you have a personal or hobby web site, and get free [hosting] from your Internet Service Provider (ISP).
So make sure that you choose a suitable name for your business site, since it is part of your marketing and branding. We already mentioned as an example www.yourbussines.co.nz (or net.nz; .com) but there are lots of options and the last part of the name may look different, depending on whether you are a business (name.co.nz), organisation (name.org.nz), government (name.govt.nz), educational (name.school.nz) or scientific institution (name.cri.nz; name.ac.nz). And these days there are even more options.
Quite often people use their business name. When this has already been taken by someone else, you may have to be a bit innovative and come up with abbreviations or variations on your business name. One way to find out what is (not) available is to visit [The Office of the Domain Name Commissioner] and type in your suggested name and preferred extension in the domain search box. When you are there, also have a look at available [registrars] for the .nz name. A comparison of domain name registration for some registrars is provided [here].
Hosting your web site
Before your web site is finished and ready to be sent to the web (uploading), you need to have organised for it to be hosted by an Internet Service Provider, or ISP. This can be a New Zealand ISP, or an internationally based one and you are spoiled for choice.Just looking at the New Zealand based ones, [NetGuideWeb] provides an overview of hosts. Make sure that the ISP provides File Transfer Protocol (FTP), which allows off-line editing of your web site and a quick upload when ready. Other things that may be important to you may be their email service, ISP web-based traffic analysis (see [below]), php/asp, and the possibility to use databases (e.g. MySQL or others) on your site. Of course service and reliability (or up-time of your site, e.g. always available) should be your top priority.
How effective is your site?
So your site has been up and running for a while and you are wondering how effective it is. Is your site attracting extra business for you? One thing we do for all our clients is to set up all clickable email addresses with an automatically generated subject header which can read whatever you choose. One option is a simple "Query from your {CompanyName} web site" subject header. So when you receive emails with that header you know it was via your web site. And while we are at it, we also use javascript to give you extra protection against possible spam.Secondly, we use specialist software to analyse the traffic logs generated for your web site. Information for your web site is collected by most ISP hosts each time someone visits your site. We can access the generated traffic log which holds a host of information, from how people found your site, to how many unique visitors you got, where they came from, what search terms they used, what computer system or browser they use, and much more. This knowledge allows us to advise you whether your site is effective, and what could be done to increase traffic.
