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What do I need to know about websites?

The ingredients - it can be difficult to understand when starting out that there are a few things you need in order to have a website. Bear in mind that you can use oobaweb to take care of it all, or choose a seperate company for each step.

First off, you need a domain name (e.g. www.mycompanyname.co.za). If you have a company name, you can find out if the domain name is available here! If you don't, it's worth bearing in mind that a domain name that describes what you do can work wonders in getting your site noticed!

oobaweb will register your chosen domain in the appropriate domain name register - South African domains records have a seperate register to, say, a .co.uk or .com domain.

Next, you choose who will host your website. Why do I need a hosting company? As an example, you can host your website on your own PC at home. The actual web pages will be saved onto your hard drive, as will your emails etc. As you know, being connected to the internet, you have to pay your ISP for the privilege. And you also pay for bandwidth, the amount of data sent up and down from your PC. So, when lots of people start to find your website, you'll be paying for all the pages they're "downloading" from your PC (Bandwidth is very expensive in South Africa, which is why most hosting companies offer space in the US, UK or Europe where it is much much cheaper). On top of that, you will need to keep your PC switched on all the time - the web never sleeps and your site needs to be up and running 24/7. And finally, you will need to keep up with service packs, patches and virus checkers to make sure that no-one is "compromising" your PC. And this is pretty much what the hosting company takes care of - giving you space in a server hub directly on the internet backbone, 24/7, regular backups, data-protection, powerful machines and high security.

And finally, the web-design company. You may prefer to do this yourself, or take a look at our portfolio and decide if oobaweb can help you with this too.