• Sitesee Travel

Domains & Providers

The area of domains and providers in site development is probably the least understood by any of you who have never had any experience with owning a website.

Domains

Let's begin with domain or domain name. Most of us do understand that in order to visit a website on the Internet, the site must have an Internet address. This Internet address is called a URL or Uniform Resource Locator. Put simply, the domain for your website is your website address or URL.

After deciding what you want your address to be ( i.e. - www.mynewwebsite.com), we first contact a domain registry service. This is usually accomplished through the many registry websites that are available on the Internet. Upon submitting your new name, the registry service will research the name in the web registry of names and will either approve or disapprove your submission depending on whether the name you submit is available or already registered by someone else. If approved, you will exclusively own the name and it will be your address or URL that any visitor to your site uses to access your site. The cost of this service is usually somewhere between $30 to $50 for a one or two year contract. To keep your web address as time goes on, you will need to renew your contract at the end of each term. We assist all of our clients in the domain registry process and subsequent administration. If you already own a domain, it is simply a case of pointing it to your new site.

Sitegraphics does all of the necessary work required to get your new site up and running.

Providers

Once you have a domain address, your new site will need a provider or a web host. A provider or web host is an Internet computer storage facility where all of the files that have been built for your site are placed and stored. For a specified yearly fee, providers make available very large storage computers that store thousands of web site pages and sites. These computers are specifically formatted to allow any visitor to access them using the URL or address of your site. Just as in finding a domain registry service, providers are found all over the Internet showing rate, fees and other pertinent information to help you decide which service might be right for you.

Providers usually bill by the year and have different rate scales depending on the amount of resources that your site will need and whether they are offering any special discount or introductory packages at the time you contract with them. As in our assistance of the domain registry process, we assist all of our clients in their web host search. If you already have a provider, we will work with whomever you have worked with in the past.

Webmasters

One last thought. It's important to be aware of the fact that the majority of website owners find that it is necessary to change copy and graphics as time goes on. New services, new products, changing business procedures, even something as simple as a new telephone number or business address. The reasons are many. The big question is how you can make changes, delete or alter any of your Internet files and pages once they have been built and loaded onto the provider's storage system. To learn about this important issue, please go to our Webmaster Program page.