Let’s talk about the 3 Components of your digital footprint. One of the biggest reason for our business growth in website design was, “help, my old designer is no longer around – I cannot contact him or her anymore”. The result a website held hostage, and a church that appears to the public as if it is not doing anything new.
3 PRIMARY components go into your website. I will break each one down and then thoughts about each to empower you for success – even if you do not want to use our services – my desire as a former church planter and pastor is to help you succeed.
THE DOMAIN
The domain is the “pointer” to where the website is being hosted. The domain is the “address” someone types in when they want to go to your church site. For example, a domain is the: www.miltoncounseling.com.
It is a habit for many who do not understand what I am sharing here to purchase the domain with the chosen hosting company. VERY BAD idea!!! Here is why. (This comes from lessons learned over 20 years) If after 6 months you realize that the hosting company is horrible – guess who owns that domain for the first year? Not you – they do.
We HIGHLY recommend and have pointed every one of our clients to go to https://domains.squarespace.com and purchase or transfer their domain as soon as possible to google. (note that domains.google.com has been purchased by Squarespace.com as of May 2024).
The cost is on average $14 for first year. (depending on the domain extension – .org; .com; .net) per year and you can buy up to (as of the time of this writing) 10 years.
Having this ownership, YOU choose where the domain points to using what is called, Domain Naming Services. Your host will give you an address to put into the naming servers in the registrar’s settings for your domain. So if the host after 3 months is not us and is bad you can leave them quickly by going back in and changing the name servers for your domain at the settings in the registrar of the domain.
SLA Clarity
HTTP versus HTTPS and SSL
THE HOST
Your hosting company is just as important if not more important than the design of your site. Many non-profits and businesses do not realize this, and often go for the least expensive. Believe me, I understand that especially for a new startup. However, there is an old adage I want to share here, “what is cheap at first may turn out to be expensive in the long haul” in other words – you get what you pay for.
Research them. Find out what they offer and compare apples to apples. Find out where their data centers are located. A Datacenter is a room filled with computers called servers.
These data centers are connected to the “cloud” or internet and this is where your website resides.
If we can liken it to a holiday gathering with family. The domain is what the holiday is and the host is the address of the family members home where the holiday will be celebrated.
One clear thing to look at is what is called their SLA (service level agreements) which defines the boundary of where they are contractually obligated to serve up your site to the public and where they will be held at fault. This is usually represented using a percentage value. For example, a 99% uptime is a common one, and seems GREAT but think about it. Do the math; there are 525,600 minutes in a year; 99% would leave 5,256 minutes of downtime. So, this means that they are allowed 87 hours of downtime before being held responsible.
Another important item a hosting company should offer (at this point out of the box no additional charge) is SSL.
Which is an abbreviation for Secure Socket Layer. I will not bore you with the details as to what it fully is, but just share that this makes your site a little more secure and gives you the ability to have the little “lock” symbol show and use HTTPS:// (secure) versus HTTP:// (unsecured). The HTTP transmits data in raw format, so when someone fills out a form on your site – the data transmitted to the server is readable by a hacker. HTTPS makes that data unreadable and much more difficult to translate for the hacker.
THE WEBSITE SCAFFOLDING
The design of your website is beyond the scope of this blog. Colors, logos, images, wireframes, coding, etc. make this part of the conversation very hard to focus on one detail. Of course, all of them are important but for the sake of this blog, we are going to share why we use and advocate the use of WordPress.
There has been a push to use a service to design your site such as WIX. WIX seems to be the go-to for many non-profits. Between WIX and Squarespace the battle ensues for the small business. However, these can hurt more than benefit. Yes, cost and simplicity are great attractors, but as we shared before – you get what you pay for.
One key issue with using WIX is ownership. WIX does not give you the code of your site if/when you decide to go to another host and use the site. Yes, that means IT IS GONE! Unless we help you and redesign the site to look exactly the same as it did in WIX. Can we do that – YES! Except for the images that may be licensed to WIX – we can build a site to look exactly like what WIX has. The PLUS to that – we give you the code. After the design is done – the site is yours – we don’t hold you hostage.
Another key issue we have seen in using WIX is their source coding. There is A LOT of superfluous coding in there that refers to WIX, not you. This slows down your site and when it comes to search engines – hurts you and empowers them tremendously.
So why WORDPRESS? Well first we are not speaking of wordpress.org and building a blog site there. We are speaking of the backend application, which is still part of the WORDPRESS organization, but it is open source. Which means that it is free.
This back end of WordPress has the ability to search through thousands of plugins; some free, some for a nominal cost depending on their function. Also, it allows for Search Engine Optimization that is all about you, not someone else. The visitor WILL never know that it is a WordPress backend site.
The pluses are that it can operate as an amazing website using pages, but then also a blog for your non-profit/business all at the same time. Then with the plugins which again are mostly free – provide you great tools to create email lists, develop a community, lead generation, appointment scheduling, embed your YouTube videos, and more.
These features are not included out of the box or are limited with the services companies such as WIX, Squarespace, and others.
We are NVMedia and we are here to help you succeed and empower you to have a clear understanding of your digital footprint.
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