The following is a list of costs that may be involved in
setting up a website or online store:
- Web hosting can range from free to $80/mth or
more.
- Domain Name Registration - visit Melbourne IT for
pricing. There are many other companies who you can register
domain names through. See also GoDaddy.
- Website design and construction - can be fixed
price or paid by the hour depending on the developer you
choose. Masikati prices are from around $200 and are fixed
price after the scope of the project has been agreed.
- Business registration - you must have a
registered Business Name to be able to use ".com.au" Domain
Names. No restrictions apply to ".com" Domain Names.
- Merchant Account set up - if you are going to
accept payments via credit card you will need a Merchant
Account with the Bank of your choice. Alternatively, you can open an account with Paypal which
will allow your customers to pay via credit card without you having a Merchant Bank Account.
Paypal charges fees depending on the type of account you open. Refer to < ahref="http://www.paypal.com">Paypal
for their fee schedule.
- Online Payment Gateway - this should not be
confused with a Merchant Account. An online payment gateway
allows credit card transactions on your website to be
immediately cleared online. Setup of an online
payment gateway account is moderately expensive and there
are ongoing charges as well as transaction fees for each
credit card payment that is cleared. You do not need to
use an Online Payment Gateway in order to securely
accept credit card transactions from the internet. All you
need is your Merchant Bank Account and a method of providing
the transaction details to your bank. Your bank will tell
you how to do this. Some provide phone-in services, some
provide software and dial up modems, where you key the
transaction details and and transmit them to the bank.
- Paid search engine submission is optional but
will ensure that your website is listed in 1-2 days instead
of the much longer wait involved with free submission to
search engines.
- Paid advertising is also optional but if you are
not using a service like Yahoo Shopping then pay-per-click
ads or priority listing in search engines is probably a good
idea to give your new web business a kick-start.
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A Web Host refers to the company who owns/runs the computer
on which your web pages are stored. You normally pay a fee for
a "hosting package" which entitles you to a certain amount of
disk space, an amount of traffic (page views) allowed on your
site per month and often Domain Name hosting and email
addresses. There are free hosting services available and many
of these are quite good. The biggest differences are usually
that they do not host Domain Names so you can't have the web
address of your choosing and they do not guarantee the
reliability and availability of their service. This is usually
because free services are very popular and at times the
servers get bogged down with the volume of traffic they are
trying to handle.
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Search Engines are the Number 1 way people will find your
website when they do not already know your web address. Search
Engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista etc, allow
people to type in search or "key" words and based on these
they display a "hit list" of results that match those key
words. Each Search Engines uses different criteria to
determine the order that they display matching web sites in
(ranking criteria).
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Melbourne IT
and many Web Hosting companies will offer Domain Name
Registration services. Registering your domain name simply
reserves that name for you. It does not give you any web
hosting services nor does it connect your domain name with
your web site.
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Delegating a Domain Name means getting that name to point
to an actual web site. Your Web Host will normally do this for
you. They record your Domain Name on their Name Servers
and tell the name servers exactly where on their computers
your website resides. After delegation it can take a couple of
days for your Domain Name information to be transmitted around
the world to all of the other main Domain Name Servers. Once
that happens, anyone anywhere in the world will be able to key
in your Domain Name and have the contents of your web pages
delivered to their browser.
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If you already have a website and Domain Name but decide
for some reason to move it to a different web host, then you
will need to transfer your domain name to the new web host's
name servers. The new web host will normally do this for
you.
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Yes, this can be done quite seamlessly. Your store
developer just needs to create the store with the same page
layout as the rest of your web site and place a link on the
existing web site to the store component. Visitors will never
notice that they move from one site to another.
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What technology do the Masikati brand online
stores use?
Masikati Stores have been developed using Microsoft Access
databases and ASP (Active Server Pages). Access databases will
support many thousands of products. If you choose a Masikati
brand online store you will need to choose a web host who
supports this type of technology (usually they will use NT
servers).
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If I pay for a
Masikati store to be setup will the store always have to be
maintained by Masikati?
No, there are many developers available with Access and ASP
skills. After installation you are free to find another
developer at any time. If you only intend to change product
information and prices, you will be able to do that yourself
and will not need a developer at all. A developer will only be
needed if you wish to change the look of your store or the way
in which it operates.
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Can I add products
and changes prices myself with Masikati
stores?
You can maintain category and product information yourself
with both types of store. Try a test drive.
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What kind of
statistics are provided for web page hits and
sales?
Masikati brand
stores provide statistics on page hits, clicktrails and
referring urls. You can view the statistics available by doing
a test drive of our sample store.
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Are Masikati brand
stores secure?
We use a secure shopping cart package from Mal's Ecommerce. This
shopping cart uses Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology just
as Yahoo Store does. Credit card information is captured using
this encryption and is therefore protected for any third party
intervention. Order notification emails sent to the merchant
do not contain credit card information. As store owner you
sign into the shopping cart Administration and enter a secure
area (all transmissions are then encrypted) to retrieve full
payment details including the credit card numbers.
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Why can't I find my
website in Search Engines?
Search engines are a minefield! They all use different
criteria for ranking your website and are prone to change the
rules without notice! If you search for "web designers" you
will get over 2 million hits on Google. That's a lot of
competition and to expect to appear high in those rankings is
very ambitious! When you choose keywords to be built into your
website you need to firstly think about what words and phrases
you would use to find the services or products offered, then
you need to use a tool like Overture
to see which search phrases people really are using. Choosing
the most popular is not necessarily the right thing to do!
That's like choosing "web designer" as your key phrase. It
might be used a lot but it's not very specific and there is
too much competition to hope to appear on the first page. Make
your targeted key words more specific. "Brisbane web design"
or "Yahoo web designer" for instance are far better to aim
for.
Climbing higher in search engine rankings also takes time.
Don't give up if the initial results are disappointing. Revise
your keywords, check that your keywords are in the important
areas of your web pages- ie. page titles, headings and
repeated several times throughout the text. Resubmit to search
engines and try again! With the slow turnaround times on free
submission you should not expect the best possible results for
your website ranking in under 6 months. It may take 12
months!
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How can I get
my website on the first page of a search engine hit
list?
Refer to our newsletter
on Search Engine Optimisation.
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What are the risks
of choosing a lesser known, cheaper web host?
The main risks are that you will not have 99.9%
availability or the web hosting company may go out of
business! That's not to say that you should forget about
low-cost hosting as an option. There's nothing wrong with
testing the water for 6 months or so with a low cost start.
Just make sure that your web designer has a full copy of your
website so that it can be moved somewhere else quickly and
cleanly in the case of an emergency - or if you simply decide
to upgrade for performance, space or bandwidth usage reasons.
And then of course, it may prove to be a great success and you
won't move anywhere!
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Can I build my
own web site?
Websites which do not encompass online stores can be built
using excellent tools such as Macromedia Dreamweaver and
Microsoft Frontpage. What a web developer offers, is their
graphic design skill, their time (freeing you up for other
aspects of your business) and the benefit of their experience
with the internet.
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Many websites have
"Flash" animations - how many people really have the Flash
plugin and if my website uses animation will I prevent some
people from accessing my website?
Most people do have the Flash plugin but not all. The best
approach to using an animation is to ensure that any
information contained within it is accessible via standard web
pages as well.
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