Locaweb Blog

The confusion between web design and web development is as common and as old as the world wide web. In great part, it stems from the fact that in the beginning of the web there really was no distinction – people who fulfilled one role fulfilled the other as well. This can be observed up to this day in markets where the web is at an earlier stage of development, and even in advanced markets among individuals who are starting to work with the web, be it as web professionals or as commercial users.

In general, people tend to either think that web designers are “people who make sites”, and don’t know there’s such a thing as web developers. Those that have learned a little bit more about the subject usually go a bit further and think that web designers are the ones who do the visual website design, and web developers are the “grease monkeys” that complete the less visible, drier tasks of programming the website and making it work the way the web designers imagined. Both those visions are limited, in my opinion, though the second one has become somewhat common and is largely accepted as true.

The way I see it, web design is a subset of a larger process that is web development. Web development encompasses understanding what the website owner needs, designing the website’s layout and user interaction, programming, positioning the website in search engines such as Google, setting up applications such as e-mail and e-commerce for the customer, etc. Web design is the part of this process concerned with the information organization, visual design, and overall user experience. Purists will point out that each of these functions could be performed by a different specialist, which is true, but the combination of them is what can probably be most accurately name web design.

This is a subject that usually causes heated discussions, and in my opinion these discussions don’t lead anywhere. The important thing to watch out for when you choose someone to create your website, you should be on the lookout and make sure that the company or person who is going to be creating it has the necessary skills to do a good job in all aspects, and not just the visual design. It doesn’t matter what label they introduce themselves with; you should always try to see their previous work and if possible talk to some of the owners of the websites they created.

The Web Host

Price

Support

Tools

The Technical Stuff

Company History

The Internet as we know it has been around for 16 years. It’s come a long way from the days of the first browsers, and purists might argue that the Internet has actually been around much longer than that. But one thing has changed very little in all this time: Every single day, millions of small business owners, potential bloggers, and many other people all over the world ask themselves the same question: “I want to have a website, but how do I create one?”

Googling questions such as that will yield millions of results. Most of them, however, are either very complicated or very superficial for the absolute beginner. So here in this article I want to explain shortly the first step of creating your first, very basic website: Choosing a domain name. I will follow this up with other articles explaining a little bit more about how to make your website know to Google and other search engines, how to use styles to make it visually appealing, and other interesting information for the beginning web entrepreneur.

Basically, a website is a place where web pages, images and other documents are stored on a computer. This place has an address so people can find it, which is called a “domain”. This address is the text that you type into your browser’s address bar (that field at the top) in order to access a website. Never mind the “http://www.” that you usually see at the beginning of these addresses in the browser – that is a technical matter that doesn’t concern us at this time. The domain, or website address, is the rest. Therefore, in the case of Google, for example, the domain is “google.com”. Domains are registered by authorized private companies and public entities, which keep records on what person owns what domain name, and where in the world the documents related to that domain name are physically located (“hosted”). More on these entities later.

That said, the first thing you should do is choose a good domain name for your website. I’ll go even further than that: Ideally, you should choose your domain even before choosing a name for your business, blog, or whatever the domain will be used for. The reason for that is that many domain names are already taken, and you may not register a duplicate. So why not just choose something that reminds people of your company, but is not exactly your company name? Because people will naturally try to find your website by typing yourcompanyname.com. It’s an internet “habit”, and nowadays the Internet is a basic building block of any successful enterprise. So again, for effect: Choose your domain name wisely and carefully integrate it with your business plan, otherwise you might be in for a lot of problems in the future.

The illusion that having a whole “word” as your domain name will pull in a lot of traffic is a false one. Stories abound of millionaire domain name auctions for names like “pizza.com”, but when people are looking for something online, they’ll generally go straight for the brands, like “dominos.com”. Having a strong brand and the domain name to accompany it are by far preferable than grabbing hold of a generic word. That especially true if you have intentions of going abroad, since even English language words will not be immediately obvious search choices for non-English speakers. That is why “ibm.com” makes much more business sense than “computers.com” or “technology.com”.

Try to keep your domain name (and business name!) short and simple, while keeping it meaningful. “aa.com” is the domain name for American Airlines, but they have the full domain name that they redirect to aa.com as well. It’s a little risky, in my opinion, since they aren’t know outside the internet as “AA” – People use that acronym for Alcoholics Anonymous (“aa.org”), and I’d bet money that the American Airlines website gets a lot of wrong accesses from people looking for help with their bad habit.

That reminds me of another important aspect of domain names. Using .com is usually better and more familiar around the world. Of course, finding a good .com domain nowadays can be very hard. Also, the .com extension was created with the intent of being used for commercial ends. The .org extension, on the other hand, was intended for general non-commercial organizations, and so forth. So each extension has its uses, as the AA example above shows. But also as the example illustrates, it is natural for people to always try the “.com” extension first, and many browser search engines look for that extension first, so not using it can mean lost traffic, just as using it in association with a bad domain name.

One last comment on the topic of extensions: Many ccTLDs, which are the country-specific domain extensions such as .MX for Mexico or .AR for Argentina are widely used, and may be a smart choice if you conduct your business mainly within the specific countries. You will usually create an image of proximity with the local customers, and have a much easier time finding as available domain name to register.

Don’t use plurals, articles such as “a” or “the”, and if possible avoid hyfens, which even though valid will make it harder for people to remember the correct domain name. The possible exception is when hyphens are already part of your brand name and identity. “mercedez-benz.com” and “thecheesecakefactory.com” are 2 examples that comes to mind.

One last topic about domain names is where to register them. Depending on the extension you wish to register, you will have different choices of companies or entities, usually called “registrars”, with whom to register your domain. Locaweb is an authorized registrar for many domain extensions, such as .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info and .name, as well as all the commercially available .br extensions. We are constantly adding new extensions to our portfolio, and can also help our customers determine where to register other extensions in case we still don’t have them available.

I hope that helps all you new web entrepreneurs understand the basics of a domain name a little better. Of course we are always available to help, and in case you want to know more about this or other website-related themes, don’t hesitate to look us up.