Website Planning Glossary

This is the physical location of your website. The type of host space you need is mainly determined by the size of your site and how much traffic it generates. Phoenix Technologies uses a number of Web Hosts, with preference for GoDaddy so we have all account maintenance on one access page, depending on the various needs of our clients. We will help you determine your needs and get your new host space set up for you or we can work with your existing host provider.

If you wish to be billed directly by your host for their services, we need your credit card information (Visa, Mastercard, Discover or American Express - note, not all hosts accept all cards) including card number, expiration date, 3-digit verification number on the back of your card, and the appropriate name, address and telephone information.

While we ourselves do not accept credit cards directly, we do accept credit card or bank payment through PayPal.

Please see the Hosting page for more information on packages and rates.

Domain Name Search

If you don't already have a domain name (www.yoursite.com), Phoenix Technologies can register one for you.

You will need to research whether or not the name is available by visiting DomainTechs.com and clicking on the "Whois" tab or any other domain name search engine you choose. After you have found the domain name you want, you can either register it yourself or let Phoenix Technologies register it for you for $15/year.

Domain Name Transfer

If you already have a domain name and you are moving to a new host, you must include the user and password information for Phoenix Technologies to transfer your domain

Email

Depending on your host service provider, you can have multiple email addresses with your domain name, such as: "info@yourdomain.com" or "sales@yourdomain.com" and you can have your email forwarded directly to your personal ISP account to make getting your business email easy.

Or you can choose to have your email held in your site's "email-box" (POP3 account) and pick it up using email handling applications like Outlook Express. Whatever you choose, Phoenix Technologies can help you setup email retrieval to suit your needs.

Email Forwarding

If you are hosting with Phoenix Technologies your package will include multiple email addresses and aliases.
These site email links can be forwarded to your personal email accounts. As an example, a small business package with three email addresses will be used.

XYZ Company wants to use the following email links on its site:

The XYZ Company wants their employee Robert Smith to field questions from viewers. They want the web director, John Doe to maintain their email list and they want all other site mail to go to Alan Jones.

Since there are only three email accounts, some of these links must become aliases. We can make info@xyz.com be a main site email account and make questions@xyz.com an alias. The alias would forward to the same personal email account of RSmith@aol.com. We can also make webdirector@xyz.com a main site email account and make webdirector@xyz.com an alias. These would then be forwarded to JDoe@yahoo.com.

The final outcome would be this:

Site Email Link	Site Account	Forwards To
info@xyz.com	info@xyz.com	RSmith@aol.com
questions@xyz.com (alias)	info@xyz.com	RSmith@aol.com

webdirector@xyz.com	webdirector@xyz.com	JDoe@yahoo.com
email_list@xyz.com (alias)	webdirector@xyz.com	JDoe@yahoo.com

suggestions@xyz.com	suggestions@xyz.com	AJones@prodigy.com
xyz@xyz.com (alias)	suggestions@xyz.com	AJones@prodigy.com

The last site email address, xyz@xyz.com is a "dump all" account. This will receive unsolicited site email or email that is not specifically addressed.

Driving traffic to your website
Search Engines | Link requests | Print media

Search Engines
There are many ways to encourage customer's to visit your site. One prime source on the internet is a search engine. There are hundred's of them and they all collect and rank websites by different means. Phoenix Technologies offers custom registration of your site with ten of the top search engines to increase your traffic.

Most all search engines index your site by using some hidden code on your front page called Meta Tags. There are three tags that you will want to concern yourself with: the Title tag, Description tag, and the Keyword tag.

The Title tag is what you see on the first line when your site shows up on the search engines.

The Description tag is often what is used in search engine results to describe your site to viewers. This line can be as long as you want it, even several sentences, but most search engines will abbreviate it to less than 20 words.

The Keywords tag is what viewers type into the search engine to find you. They are also often used by search engines to index your site into a category. This is the most critical tag on your site.

You'll want to come up with every word and phrase you can think of that someone might type into a search engine to find you. You'll also want to put the 10 most important words/phrases first in the line. Order of priority counts on this.

Link Requests
Another way to drive traffic to your website is to request other industry related sites to place a link on their site to your website. Phoenix Technologies offers site maintenance services and will seek out sites, both local and national, that are related to your company or sites that offer lists and categories that include the services you provide.

Print Media
It is well documented in business market research that customers who have in-depth access to a business's services are more likely to buy from that business. You can provide potential customers a way to access you business information by including your website address on all of your business print media, including yellow page ads, business cards and flyers.