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Get That Website Online, easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.
Do I really need a website?
Yes.
Or no.
One thing is certain though.
You need somewhere to send prospective clients and connections when they want to know more.
You could use your LinkedIn profile.
You could even use a Facebook page.
But wouldn’t it be somehow more … professional … to have a website too?
You only need 3 things for a website: a name (a domain), a home (a hosting provider) and a welcome mat (a page).
Everything else is an add-on: extra functionality that might be useful at some point, but isn’t immediately necessary.
Yeah. Like it’s that easy.
It can be!
Some of the ease depends on how much content you’ve already got about who you are and what you do.
Some depends on how much you want your website to do from Day One.
Some depends on who you choose to work with to get it done …
Hey! I’m Ginette – a self-confessed geek for all things online …
I actually got into web design and hosting kind of by accident. It started when I was a cash-strapped newbie business owner (and also stubbornly against paying for anything I didn’t understand).
Back then you couldn’t get a website built for less than £1,000 (and most designers charged several times that amount – even for something pretty basic).
So I decided to learn how to do it myself. Learnt a bit of code, learnt a bit of jargon and created my very first website. I was ridiculously proud of myself!
Since then, things have got a LOT easier for people like me – especially if you choose to build on WordPress like I do and you know where to look for opportunities. I’ve built and refreshed many websites since then and now I’ve moved into offering domain names and hosting too.
But I know there are also lots of people who find the whole thought of getting a website together really overwhelming.
So I created Get That Website Online (a sister site to my main online course business Get That Course Online) as a way of helping people Get That Website Online as quickly and painlessly (and cheaply!) as possible.
Get That Website Online: home of the One Page Website
Pesky jargon! Here’s a handy guide in case you don’t speak geek:
Alt Text
Alt Text (or Alternative Text) is text that is ‘hidden’ behind images on a website so that those with screen readers can be given an idea of what the image is all about if it’s integral to the page content.
This can be a factor in SEO scoring (as in not having it is not good!).
Browser
This is the ‘window’ you use to search for website addresses (URLs). Most popular ones include Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera, although some people (for no sensible reason that I can fathom) also like Edge.
Browsers are separate to search engines (so Google Chrome is a browser, whereas Google is a search engine). Search engines are simply massive websites that exist to show you results of your search for information on the internet. You could use Google on Safari if you wanted to (and many people do).
Cache / Caching
When you visit a website page, a copy of the page is usually temporarily held on your computer (known as the cache). The idea is that if you visit the page again, your computer can load it faster if it already has a copy on file.
Issues come when something on the page has changed and you can’t see the new version without ‘clearing your cache’ – this is something to bear in mind if you are creating your own website at any point.
Cookie
Although it would be great if these really were chocolate chip, cookies in this context refer to a tiny piece of script (or coding language) that is added to someone’s computer files in order to keep track of what they’ve looked at.
While there’s no doubt that some people use cookies for nefarious means, in reality most cookies are incredibly helpful, doing things like remembering login details or our preferences when we have options for what to see.
In the UK (and many other countries) it is a requirement to display a ‘cookie notice’ when someone visits your website, to let them understand what cookies are being used and why. In some cases there are also options to switch off certain types of cookie.
Although this is great from a data protection persepctive, unfortunately, this can also mean that sometimes the cookie that knows you’ve seen the cookie notice can’t be used, so you have to respond to it every single time you visit certain websites …
All GTWO websites come with a cookie notice plugin and basic privacy policy / cookie statement as standard.
Domain
Your domain, or domain name, is the human-friendly address of your website! It is one part of the entire URL that identifies individual websites.
Your computer uses the URL to know what to look for, where to look and how to load a website – but the information it needs to do this is not very human-friendly, so domain names exist to make life easier for us!
http / https
http (hypertext transfer protocol) and https (hypertext transfer protocol secure or hypertext transfer protocol delivered through a Secure Socket layer (SSL)) are the set of rules that govern requests from a web browser to a web server i.e. the web browser says “I’d like to visit this website page please” and the web server says “Of course – here you go”. (They’re very polite you know.)
All websites served through Google (and by extension Google Chrome) are required to have the secure version or risk being marked as an ‘unsafe’ website.
The security layer (which is delivered by SSL) adds extra encryption to any data submitted through the website, which minimises the risk of this information being hijacked and used by people with shady intentions!
All GTWO hosting packages and websites offer free security certificates to ensure https is usable.
IP address
An IP address (or Internet Protocol) address is the unique string of numbers and letters that identifies a device that is connected to the internet.
Your computer has one. Your smart phone has a separate one. Your tablet has another one again.
Any device that connects to the internet has its own IP address. This is to ensure everything that is sent to you reaches you.
“Aha!” you say (go on, just for me), “How then can I send and receive emails without duplication on my computer and my phone, if they have different IP addresses?”
Good question. Would you believe the Internet Pixies sort it out? No? OK then.
The word ‘address’ is the problem here – it’s not just an address, it’s a route to get to the address too. Your devices link together by knowing that whatever route is used to get to ‘you’, they all end up with the same destination (you) and therefore you don’t have lots of different IP addresses, you just pick your post up from lots of different addresses …
Yes, of course there’s more to it than that, but that’s what Google’s for, no?!
ISP
ISP (or Internet Service Provider) is the company that gives you access to the internet in the first place.
Typically you will get your internet broadband access through BT, Virgin or Sky in the UK. Increasingly mobile network providers are offering this service and there are a number of smaller operations that do it to.
I use Zen Internet for my fibre optic broadband supply and very good they are too!
Plugin
This is an extra piece of functionality that can be added to your website to do something specific, giving you more bells and whistles than you have with a basic website.
Some plugins are free, some are paid and usually you get what you pay for!
This website for example has a plugin for checking for security threats and another one to deliver the cookie notice.
Responsive
This refers to whether or not a website is able to change it’s layout depending on the device it’s being viewed on.
Clearly the layout that looks best on a computer monitor is not going to work for a mobile phone, so the website needs to be responsive to the device.
All GTWO websites are responsive by default.
SEO
SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is the term used to describe how well a website has been designed in order to make it rank higher in search engine results.
There are other terms thrown around with this one – notably ‘black hat’ and ‘white hat’ strategies, which refer to above board (white) and less than ethical (black) techniques employed by techie folk.
All GTWO websites come as white hat optimised, but the tweaks made to a website are not the entire reason a site ranks well or not.
Again another one for Google (and I’d recommend searching for Backlinko)!
URL
The URL (or Uniform Resource Locator) of a web page is the full, computer-friendly address of a particular web page, as distinct from the domain name (which is the human-friendly version).
The domain name of this website is GetThatWebsiteOnline.com and every page in the website starts with this (and also https://), but whenever you see something in the address bar of your browser that looks like a mostly unintelligible string of characters, letters and numbers, that’s a URL!
More geek translation here.
Domains
find the perfect name for your website at guaranteed low and staying low prices!
Hosting
fast, secure, reliable, UK-based hosting package with everything you need
Building
start with the one-page-website, expand to website-in-a-box or go full bespoke