I’ve been asked this question many times by clients. Some are concerned that their hosting company is double-billing them. Others have assumed that the second notice they received was spam and can be ignored. And others are just plain confused about which companies are involved in keeping their website online.

To keep your website online, you need to make ongoing payments for two types of services:

1. Domain Registration
2. Hosting

These services can be paid for monthly, yearly, or once every few years, but most of my clients choose to pay yearly. The two bills often come due at the same time of year – the time when your website was initially launched. It’s important that you pay for both these services in a timely fashion, or you website will be taken offline.

Let’s review these two services so you’ll understand the key role they each play.

Domain Registration

Your web site’s domain is the name people type into their browser to visit your website. For example, ours is usablewebdesigns.com. (The http://www. that goes in front of it is not, strictly speaking, part of the domain name.) You may have several domains that point to the same site. (For example, if we wanted to, we could also have usablewebdesigns.ca point to our site.)

A hierarchy of international organizations coordinate the use of domain names. At the bottom of the hierarchy are the domain registrars. A domain registrar is a company who can reserve a name for you so that you can use it for your web site. You must keep your payments with them up to date or they will put your domain name back on the market for someone else to buy. Your web site’s domain name is an important part of your branding; it’s your online address, where customers know they can find you. So this is one bill you don’t want to be late on.

Scam alert! However, you do need to watch for scams. Over the years we’ve received official-looking emails and paper scam letters for domain renewals. Some of them ask for as much as $500! You should make a record of the companies you have your domain registration and hosting accounts with and the time of year they come up for renewal and the yearly cost. A typical cost for domain registration is between $10 and $20 per year (not per month).

I’ve been recommending Netfirms.com as a domain registrar up till now, because they are inexpensive, but I’m currently seeking a new registrar that offers improved support and a friendlier ordering system. (Their ordering system tries to sneak extra products into your purchase.)

Paying to register a domain just gives you the right to use that domain. It does not give you place to put your website where people can see it. That’s where the hosting comes in.

Hosting

In day-to-day language, a “host” is someone who invites you into their home or business. They allow you to make use of their physical space. In the web world, a host is a company that lets your web site live on their disk space and lets visitors access that website from their computer.

When you pay for hosting, you are paying a company to keep a copy of your website on their server and to let you set up email accounts on that server (if you wish) and to keep copies of the emails you send and receive. It is their job to keep the computer operating and connected to the internet 24/7. You’ll want a company that has a good reputation for uptime and customer support. You definitely want a company that is big enough to have support staff available 24/7 in case there are hosting issues during the night or the weekend. HostJury.com is a good place to get peer reviews of web hosting companies.

I currently recommend two hosting companies:
BlueFur.com (Canadian)
ICDSoft.com (International)

When you consider all that they do for you, hosting prices are a steal. There are reputable companies who will host your website for as little as $6 to $10 a month. Add in the cost of domain registration and you’re looking at $85 to $140 per year to keep your website online. Compare that to the price of putting a single business-card-sized ad in your local newspaper for just a week. Web sites are a bargain!

If you don’t pay your hosting on time, your host company will likely give you a warning or two and then take your site offline. If you’ve made a backup of the site (you do backup your site, right?), then you’ll need to repurchase the hosting, and possibly reinstall the site (unless they’ve kept a copy handy for you).

Combined Hosting and Domain Registration

Many companies offer both hosting and domain registration, so you can have both under one account with one bill a year. In the past I have recommended clients to buy the two items separately to save on the cost of domain registration; however seeing the confusion this causes many clients I am now revising my opinion. Buying a combined plan may cost an extra $20/year for your registration, but that could easily be worth it.

What Not to Do

Avoid passwords such as ‘password’, ‘secret’ with a single number added, or those that use your name, business name, or a family member’s or pet’s name. With social media so popular these days, a hacker can usually find information about your family online, making it easier for them to guess your password.

Avoid choosing an obvious word and then adding the year to create a pasword. I see many users doing this. For example, let’s say they are creating a password for a library, they might choose library2007 as the password. Hackers are probably familiar with this common approach and would have written code that tries guessing passwords like this.

So how can we choose a secure password that we can actually remember?

What To Do

We’ve all seen the recommendations: include an upper and lower case letter in your password, and a number. Some web sites force you to include a punctuation character in your password as well.

A great way to create a password is to think of a phrase and turn the initials or words into a password. To incorporate the number, you might choose to change any letter o’s into zeroes and letter L’s into ones.

For example, if you ran a pet store, you might think of the phrase ‘I sell cat food’ and then change it to Ise11catfood (where the two L’s are changed to 1’s). Or it could be Isellcatf00d (where the two o’s are changed to zeroes.) Then it is easy for you to remember, but hard for people to guess. To add punctuation, you could put the whole password in brackets e.g. [Isellcatf00d] or add an exclamation mark e.g. Isellcatf00d!

This scenario  is especially common with non-profit organizations where there is relatively high turnover in volunteers and board members, and the email address on file with the account is no longer accessible by organization members. If you were to bring in a new web developer today, would you have the information handy that they need to get started on your site?

At best, not having this information can cost you unnecessary expense. At worst, it can lose you control of your domain.  That can happen if the domain expires (perhaps because you couldn’t log in to update your expired credit card information) and then someone else grabs the domain.

You should know the account information for the following:

• All your domain names. These may have been purchased from the same company you purchased your hosting from or from a separate company.  If you have more than one domain they may have been purchased all on one account or under separate accounts.
• Hosting for your web site(s). If you have more than one website, they may share hosting or they may have separate hosting.
• If you use a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla or a shopping cart, you should know the administrative account information for that CMS.

Here’s what you need to keep track of for each account.

1. The URL that you log in at. It’s not much use having a username and password if you don’t know where to use them.
2. The username. This may be your email address, but don’t count on that. It’s best to record the username for every account.
3. The password. For security reasons you shouldn’t be using the same password for every account. So you’ll want to track your passwords.

There are various tools around that will store you passwords in a secure way.  Here are reviews of some of those systems.

5 Tools for Keeping Track of Your Passwords

10 Free Ways to Track All Your Passwords

What You Said:  How you Keep Track of Your Passwords

Don’t forget to update your password tracking system any time you change a password.

Sometimes your web designer or graphic designer will ask you for the “source file” for your logo, a brochure or another graphic, so that they have a high-quality graphic to use as the basis for a design.

If the item is a photograph, the designer will want the file that came directly out of your camera (as opposed to one that has been made smaller for the purposes of putting on a website or emailing). Depending on the camera, the source photograph is likely to be in either .jpg, .jpeg or .tif format.

If the item is a graphic design, the designer may request a source file; by this we mean the file that the graphic was originally created with. Graphics are often created with one of the Adobe suite of applications, such as Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign. The file extensions of these applications are:
Adobe Illustrator: .ai
Photoshop: .psd
InDesign: .ind

Sometimes your designer will ask you for a vector graphic file. Vector graphics files are usually in one of three formats:

• Adobe Illustrator: .ai
• Encapsulated Postscript: eps
• Portable Document Format: .pdf

However, just because a document is in PDF format, doesn’t mean that it contains your graphics as vector drawings, because PDF files can contain both vector and bitmapped graphics. Here’s the difference.

Bitmapped Graphics

A bitmapped graphic is made up of lots of little rectangles (known as pixels) of solid colours. You may not notice those rectangles when the image is displayed at its intended size, but if you zoom in on a bitmapped image, you can start to see the rectangles. In the example below, the first picture is shown at its desired size, while the second picture is zoomed.

All photographs taken by digital cameras and files created using Photoshop are bitmapped. THe following types of files are bitmapped:

• .jpg
• .jpeg
• .bmp
• .gif
• .png
• .tif

Vector Graphics

A vector graphic is actually specified mathematically in the file. It can be zoomed indefinitely large without showing any pixels because it can be scaled up mathematically by the application that is doing the zooming. For example, if you have a PDF that contains only vector graphics, you can keep zooming it and zooming it and you won’t see any jagged edges made up of solid colour rectangles. Vector graphics are useful for your designer because they can save the graphic at any size needed without degradation in the quality of the image. (Bitmapped files can also be resized, but in some cases the resized image will be noticeably poorer in quality than the original.)

PDF Files

A PDF file can contain all vector graphics, all bitmapped graphics, or some of both. They easiest way to test if a PDF file is all vector graphic is to zoom it up large (try 800%) to see if rectangles start to show.

Resolution

Sometimes all you have is a bitmapped graphic (for example when you’re using a photograph). In that case, you’ll want to provide the webmaster with the highest resolution file you have. The resolution refers to the number of pixels (rectangles) across the width of the image and the height of the images. For example, the photo from your 8 megapixel camera might be 3264 pixels wide and 2448 pixels tall.

Online vs Print

The resolution of your photographs is particularly important when your designer is creating something that will be printed out, like a business card, magazine ad, or brochure. This is because paper is capable of showing much more detail than a computer screen and we want to take advantage of that feature. Although the number of pixels displayed per inch on a computer monitor varies from monitor to monitor, the standard is 72 pixels per inch. Compare this to printers, which can print 300 or more dots of ink per inch.

So if you have a photo that is 1080 pixels wide, it would display around 15 inches wide on a computer monitor, but only 3.6 inches wide on paper. So that photo is going to be quite useful for your website, but not so useful if you want to create a poster.

Doing the Math

Let’s say you have a photograph to be displayed on your website that you want to be around 3 inches across. The width in pixels will need to be at least:
3 inches x 72 pixels per inch = 216 pixels wide

If you want that same photograph to be printed out on paper around 3 inches across, the width in pixels will need to be at least:
3 inches x 300 pixels per inch = 900 pixels wide

Something to be aware of is that images often don’t scale well to sizes that that are just a bit smaller (say 80%) than the original image size. If you want a 900 pixel wide image to be printed, it’s better to give your designer a 2700 pixel wide image than a 1000 pixel wide image.

Also, note that bitmapped images do not scale up well. The rectangles are going to start showing. Although there is software on the market today that purports to “res up” (increase the resolution) of bitmapped images, there are significant limitations to what is possible and the image is likely to be blurred by the process. (More more information on that, read this article on About.com).

I recently attended this online seminar, and was surprised about some of the things I learned. It’s about an hour long, and you can view it here:

http://www.hubspot.com/the-science-of-email-marketing

Dan obtained access to statistics for 9 billion (!) emails sent using MailChimp, and analyzed them. He also held focus groups and received several hundred responses to a survey. Here are some of the findings Dan presented, along with my own thoughts.

When Should I Send Emails?

It’s a myth that business to business communications are different than business to consumer communications

It turns out that about 88% of people do not have separate work and personal inboxes. They read their personal and work related email from the same inbox, so personal emails get read at work and work emails at home. And most clickthroughs (clicking a link in an email to find more information) happen on the weekend. Perhaps this is because readers feel they have more time on the weekend to do this.

On top of that, it turns out that the days people are most likely to unsubscribe from your emails are Mondays and Tuesdays. So it’s not a bad idea to send your marketing emails on weekends, when they are more likely to be clicked through and when unsubscribes are not that high.

Data also showed that there is a sharp spike upwards in clickthroughs first thing in the morning. There is also a spike up in unsubscribes at that time of day, but the net effect is that it is still best to send early in the day.

How Often Should I Send Emails?

This one totally surprised me. Turns out that sending frequency doesn’t affect clickthrough much. Although sending once per month gets the best clickthroughs, sending more often gets only slightly fewer click throughs per email. The surprise for me was that sending often does not substantially increase unsubscribe rates. And since you’re really interested in the total number of clickthroughs not the rate of clickthroughs per email, you get better results by sending more often. So Dan says “Don’t be afraid to send too much.”

This may be because most people who don’t want your emails will unsubscribe on the first email they receive (something the data showed). After that you are dealing with people who are more likely to want your emails. As long as you are giving them value in each email, they are not that likely to unsubscribe.

What Format Should my Emails Be?

80% of users queried indicated that they read email on mobile devices, so optimizing the presentation of your email for mobile devices is likely to increase your clickthrough rates. This may mean doing a text-only email instead of HTML, or it may mean formatting your HTML to work nicely on mobile devices.

What Content Should my Emails Contain?

Including valuable reference information in your emails encourages people to want to receive your email and to devote some time to reading it. So include content, not just advertisements.

People interviewed indicated that their favourite emails were those that made them feel special – part of a select group. So give them something only subscribers get. This might be access to special information or discount codes.

Include multiple links through to your website, too. Data showed that the more links in your email the more clickthroughs you get per email. This may be a result of the reader having received various types of invitations to click and finally encountering one that “speaks” to them.

Interestingly data also showed that there was also less unsubscribing when there are more links. So find opportunities to incorporate more links into your email. Try out different invitations to click.

Instead of including a request asking people to forward your email to friends or colleagues who might be interested, ask them follow you on a social network like Twitter. They are more likely to do this and eventually those who follow them will become aware of you.

What Words Should I Use in Email Titles?

People often wonder what words to use in the title. I always assumed I should focus on the topic of the newsletter, and leave out what seemed like “wasted” words like “Newsletter”, “eNews”, “Issue” etc. Turns out that was a mistake. People are more likely to click through (which means they actually read the email in the first place) when words in the title indicated that is was a serialized newsletter.

Here are some of the words that showed up often in emails with good clickthrough rates.

• E-newsletter
• week’s
• issue
• digest
• bulletin
• edition
• news

This may not mean that just using those words makes a difference. It may be that serial newsletters in general get more clickthroughs. So try having a regular newsletter and making it clear in the title that this is what it is.

The From Address

Make sure you use a from address that the recipient will recognize. If they know you by business name, use that; if they know you by personal name use that.

Junk Email Accounts

Although people often don’t have separate work and personal email accounts, they often do have separate email addresses for receiving what they consider to be junk emails. (58% of people polled indicated they had a “junk” account.) The junk email addresses are what they use in order to access information, create accounts, or enter draws, from organizations whose emails they don’t want to have to read later.

To get them to give you their “real” email address, you need to offer something that will make them want to get your emails. This might be good informational content or time-sensitive offers they will be interested in. Seems to me, that when all is said and done, “Content is [still] king”.

1. Type the words that are going to link somewhere.
2. Select those words with the mouse.
3. Click the editor button that looks like a link in the chain. (This button doesn’t get activated till you select the text.)
4. Fill in the Link URL box. To link to a web page, the address should be: http://www.whatever.com. Don’t forget the http://. To make the link trigger an email to someone, remove the http:// from the Link URL box and type mailto:someone@whatever.com.
5. Click Insert.
6. Click Publish/Update back in the Add New Post/Edit Post screen.

You can link a picture too. Just insert the picture as usual, and then click it picture once (in the editor) and then follow steps 3 to 5 above.

1. Click the cursor at the start of the paragraph you want to put the image beside. Even if you are going to float the image to the right, you still click at the left, before the first word in the paragraph.
2. Click the little image to the right of Upload/Insert, above the editor. (If you hover your mouse over it, a tooltip will display “Add an Image”.) The screen will go grey and a popup window will display.
3. If you’re going to use a picture that has never been used in the blog before, click the Select Files button in the popup and then find the picture on your computer. Wait for it to upload – you will see a progress bar that says “Crunching” while it uploads. Then go to step 5.
4. If you want to insert a picture that has been used in the blog before, click Media Library. Find the image you want to use and click Show to the right of it. Then go to step 5.
5. Type in a description of what the picture is (e.g. “Photo of ABC Storefront”) in the Alternate Text box. This is for the search engines.
6. If you want a caption below it, fill in the Caption box.
7. Choose whether you want the picture Left, Center, or Right justified using the radio buttons. (I find that the design works more nicely when the image is to the right and not the left.)
8. WordPress automaticaly resizes the photo into several sizes for you, which are called Thumbnail, Medium, Large and Full Size. The dimensions of the images it has created are shown as ### x ###. The first number is the width and the second is the height; both are in pixels. Choose a good size. If you are floating text around an image, usually 300 pixels high or tall is good. For larger photos which are not going to have text beside them, and are usually centered, you can go to 450 pixels wide or tall.
9. Click Insert into Post (not Save all Changes; this just puts the image into the media library).
10. Now you will be back in the Add New Post or Edit Post page. Don’t forget to click the blue Publish/Update button in the post to save the picture in the post.

Related Posts:

How to Create a New Post in WordPress

How to Create a Link in WordPress

• Log in to your WordPress blog. This is done by going to www.yourwebsitename.com/wp-login.php.
• Click Posts in the left hand column.
• Click Add New (either in the left hand column or using the large white button near the middle).
• Enter the title of the article, where it says Enter Title Here. To be consistent with the rest of the blog, use mixed case for the title. Try to remember to put the title in right away. Otherwise the page gets saved with a numeric URL, and we want a URL that has the title in it.
• Copy all the text of your article into Notepad (or another ASCII text editor) first. This removes all of the HTML formatting, so that the formatting of the original article is not carried over into the blog. Notepad is accessed by clicking Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Notepad.
• Now copy the text from Notepad into the blog editor. You can now use the editor to bold or italic text, align text, or create bullet and number lists. You can also insert images or links. Most of the editor buttons are self-explanatory if you’ve used Word or formatted emails before. I’ll explain a few techniques down below.
• Often WordPress is configured to show full or partial blog posts on the home page. To indicate which bit of the blog post is supposed to show up on the home page, click the mouse once at the end of the last paragraph you want on the home page. Then press Enter on your keyboard once. Then click the Insert More tag button, which is shown to the right. A grey line will show up in your post in the editor; this will not show on the live blog.
• Now you need to tell the blog what category this post goes in. You put an article in a category by ticking off that category name in the right hand column under the heading Categories.
• Now click the big blue Publish button on the right hand side. It will rename itself Update.
• If you want to change the date of the post, you can now do that using the Edit link just above the big blue Publish/Update button, to the right of the date of the post.
• Visit the live blog at the address your visitors will use to visit your blog (e.g. www.yourwebsitename.com). This is called the front end or the live blog page. If you are already there in another window, refresh the screen using the browser control that looks like a recycle symbol or circular arrow (or use the F5 key on your keyboard if you are on a PC). This forces the browser to get the changes you’ve made to the blog so you are looking at the most recent version of the post.
• Check the post that you’ve just created to make sure it displays as you wanted.
• If you need to edit it, go back into the WordPress back end. If you are no longer on the page for editing that post, just click Posts in the left column. You will see a list of posts that exist. Click the title of the post you want to edit. Make your changes and then click Publish/Update. Then double check the live blog page. Don’t forget to refresh it before you check it.
• When you’re done, click the Log Out link at the top right corner of the back end.

Further instructions are available in other posts:

How to Insert an Image in WordPress

How to Create a Link in WordPress.

All three companies allow you to buy a monthly subscription for their services; the more emails you need to be able to send out each month, the more you pay for your subscription. Vertical Response and Mail Chimp will also let you “pay as you go”, by buying “credits” which you can then spend on sending out emails. Just like stocking up on postage stamps, you use a certain number of credits to send out each email. (Unlike buying postage stamps, you also get a discount for buying larger quantities of credits.)

So if you send out emails infrequently and/or to small lists, you’ll save money by going with the “pay as you go” option, so VerticalResponse or MailChimp would be a better choice for you. In fact, MailChimp offers a free service where you can send out to a mailing list of up to 2000 email addresses. The catch? There’s a small MailChimp logo at the bottom of every email you send out.

Remember that you need an opt-in mailing list to use any of these mailout services.

There are two kinds of mailing lists: opt-in and opt-out.

Opt-in mailing lists are lists consisting only of people who have explicitly agreed (“opted in”) to receive mail from you. Opt-out mailing lists are lists that contain people who have not explicitly agreed to receive mail from you, but which give recipients the option of being removed from your mailing list (“opting out”).

All kinds of national and international laws come into play when you look at sending out emails to a list of people. But in practice, I’ve found that the rules that are most likely to impact you, the sender, are the strict rules enforced by the companies that offer mailout services. And those rules require that you have an opt-in mailing list.

This means that you cannot “scrape” or “harvest” your mailing list off the Internet. For example, say your product is ideal for physiotherapists. You might find a web site with listings of all the registered physiotherapists in your geographic area, and create a mailing list of all their email addresses. (This is scraping or harvesting.)

You may plan to send an introductory mailout to them, describing your product. If you take a quick check into the most popular mailout services offered, everything might look good to proceed. You pay your subscription fee or buy credits to send out 10,000 emails. But as soon as you go to upload that mailing list, you will be asked to confirm that everyone one on the mailing has agreed to receive mail from you.

No problem, you think, who’s going to know? But these companies do follow up if they think your mailing list is not acceptable, and you can end up being blacklisted from their services and losing the credits you purchased or having your subscription cancelled without refund.

What about spammers? How do they get away with it? I’m no expert on this, but I expect they use ‘throw-away’ domain names and hosting to send out their mailouts. If that IP address or domain name gets blacklisted by spam-prevention software, they just move on and set up another domain on another host. But this isn’t an option for a legitimate business; you don’t want to have your web site or your email address blacklisted.

So, how do you get an opt-in mailing list? Here are some possibilities:

• Post a mailing list signup form on your web site.
• Use paid search (such as Google Adwords) to rank better in the search and include a link to the signup form in the ad or on your landing page.
• Include a link to this signup form in every customer support email you send out.
• Create partnerships with similar or complementary businesses, where each business promotes the partner’s business and mailing list.
• Offer an incentive (such as a discount), available only to mailing list members, to encourage them to sign up.
• Ask for email addresses from everyone who visits your business on-site and at trade shows.
• When on the telephone with a client or potential client, ask for their permisson to add them to your mailing list.
• Publish the link to your signup form on all promotional material (flyers, signs, registration and customer feedback forms, surveys, ads, catalogs etc).

You do have the option to buy or rent a mailing list that has been created specially for your market. However, take care to ensure that the mailing list is an opt-in mailing list where members have explicity given permission to receive email from a third party. Otherwise, you will be violating the terms of the mailout provider, and in many cases the law.