Go with a respected name in hosting. Media Temple, Rackspace, Go Daddy, and

DreamHost have all been in the game a long time, possess large customer bases,

and boast good support. Too many small hosts have unreliable uptime and ques-

tionable customer service.

Summary

Your corporate website is a complex beast, subject to the whims of management, market-

ing, your own design tastes, and customer feedback. When building or redesigning your

site, it is critical to keep the company’s primary objectives in the forefront of design activ-

ity, and let the form follow the function. It is also critical to consider the best development

platforms, from choosing the right CMS to getting the best deal in hosting. These decisions

set the tone for the rest of the site’s construction, and many future headaches can be

avoided with some smart planning.

18

WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES

Hosting considerations

No matter how the corporate website is built, the company will need to procure hosting

services. Some companies have their own data centers, which might or might not include

a web server. For small companies, hosting is best acquired through a third party. The cost

of offsite website hosting has become a deal almost too good to be true; for a paltry

monthly fee, any company can get gigs of space and bandwidth they’ll probably never use.

When choosing a host, consider several metrics:

First, make sure the host is compatible with your publishing platform. If the sites

are constructed with static HTML or authored in Flash, this is not a concern, but

any CMS will have a minimum set of requirements the host needs to meet. An

ASP.NET application will need a Windows server, while the PHP-based WordPress

and Textpattern installations work best on Apache with MySQL databases.

Get the most bang for your buck. Compare prices and features, and absolutely do

not accept any advertisements on your site placed there by the host.

Go with a respected name in hosting. Media Temple, Rackspace, Go Daddy, and

DreamHost have all been in the game a long time, possess large customer bases,

and boast good support. Too many small hosts have unreliable uptime and ques-

tionable customer service.

Summary