Is your new Start-up finally branching out into professionalism? Great!
Here are the three necessary things you need to set up to get things started.
Purchase your Domain
So what is a Domain, again?
That’s a bit of a tough one to answer without getting into techno-babble, but to say it’s the google.co.uk bit in https://www.google.co.uk is underselling it a little.
How about this: Have you ever wondered how people get personalised Email Addresses, or websites with the company’s name?
What stops say, me, from making my own google.co.uk? What stops me from making the email address [email protected], and getting and sending emails from it? There’s only 1 company that owns that domain, thankfully.
Even if you don’t want a website, could you imagine if someone pinched your company’s name by buying it themselves!
Just think of all your confused clients and customers going to the wrong website, or receiving emails that look like what your company should do.
If you’d like a beginner’s guide on the techno-babble side of Domains, this link is a great resource that explains the technical ins and outs without trying to turn you into an IT-Person:
Things to keep in mind when purchasing a Domain
We would advise you go to an IT Company to set these up, but here’s a shortlist of considerations you may need to think about:
Buy .co.uk and .com
Many Companies only bother getting the end parts of their country, but there’s an unimaginable list of end parts to a website URL.
If you buy both your country’s and .com, it stops other companies from pinching your URL with a small difference on the end.
Imagine if someone else owned www.justgilbey.com! They’d be able to send emails that look like ours, and have a website that looks like ours too!
Choose a simple Domain Provider
With the new age of the Internet, Domains are becoming so popular, that some Providers can purposefully make it a difficult process to navigate. They do this in order to encourage useless Add-Ons which cost more money.
We use NameCheap, which we find to be affordable and simpler.
We use it to purchase Domains on our Client’s behalf, and either manage it ourselves, if they don’t want the hassle of setting up email addresses and websites, or to transfer to them if they’d prefer to do it.
Setup your Email Addresses
How unprofessional do you think it is, for a business to have email addresses with @gmail.co.uk, or @yahoo.com? Does Apple have [email protected]?
You can still rely on a trusted Email Provider, like Microsoft, or Google, but having set your business’ email addresses up, you’re stating that your Brand is important enough for people to see it and think of you.
As mentioned before, ensure that the Domain Provider doesn’t upsell to you. Don’t let them sway you with things like Email Solutions, as many of these services are unnecessary, or may otherwise incur large costs down the line.
You need DNS
DNS is where we really recommend having an experienced IT Person at your back.
Domain-Name-Systems are the magic that lets people find your website on Google, lets people visit your website, and receive your Emails. If DNS is misconfigured, or if it goes down, things break.
Luckily, when purchasing your domain, you’ll get a Basic level DNS, which means as long as you set everything up correctly on your end, things should work, but without an experienced IT Person, this may be difficult.
Thanks for reading – Dylan, IT Apprentice
If you’d like some help setting or maintaining anything included in this post, feel free to contact us, and set up a (free!) Consultation. If you’d like to find out more on what we recommend a new Start-Up should know, here’s another related post: