by Trevor Zion Bauknight

Last week, we explored the numerous reasons owners of small businesses and home-based businesses need to establish their Online Identities by staking claim to a unique domain name and professional website and e-mail hosting. I asked you to think about some of the small businesses with which you're familiar and the ways you could do some of the same things to benefit your own business. This week, we'll take a look at the nuts and bolts of actually doing so.

The most important things to know about building and maintaining your business's Online Identity are the things you should avoid doing.

Free website operations like GeoCities and Angelfire really aren't suitable for a professional business website for several reasons. The foremost among these is the lack of identity awareness that comes from not having an identifiable, unique domain name. The domain name is the famous identifier, like "cafeid.com" that makes your website's location easy to remember and sets it apart from every other website on the 'Net.

The first step, therefore, in building your business's Online Identity is the selection and registration of that domain name. This used to be a daunting step; but of course, there are now dozens of companies out there willing to do this for you. Most of these companies also include some sort of website hosting deal and e-mail service. We'll get to that in a moment.

Unless you have an expert on-staff, we heartily recommend doing business with one of these all-in-one hosting providers; but be sure to take full advantage of one of the best qualities of the Internet -- the ability to research a company before doing business with them. Find out what experiences customers have had dealing with the various operations, paying special attention to patterns of complaints rather than the individual rants that you're bound to find.

We have found that some companies advertise very low prices for domain registration and then offer other hosting services a la carte, driving the price up significantly. Your domain name is yours to keep, however, and is legally separate from whatever hosting deal you may agree to; so you can always take your domain and have it point to a different hosting company (though sometimes there can be a sixty-day waiting period after the initial registration). Pay attention to and keep any e-mail you receive from a domain name registrar when you register your name, as it will often include vital login information you may need later to make such changes to your registration.

Part of securing your domain name is pointing it to at least two domain name servers that know where your website files physically reside and point visitors to them when requests are received. Typically, registration companies offer "domain parking" service which is nothing more than domain name service that points nowhere in the event that you haven't established website hosting yet. Unless you're signing up with a turnkey hosting package provider, you'll probably be parking your domain at least long enough to sign up for website hosting somewhere.

E-mail drives the Internet, in spite of the fact that an estimated 70% of it is spam, and you need e-mail service that is reliable and secure. You also don't want to have an e-mail address like joelawyer29@hotyahooonline.com when conducting business. It's just a little bit sad. Now that you have a domain name, you should make sure your e-mail address is just as professional, associated with your domain permanently and identifiably.

You may find that IMAP service offers more value for your e-mail hosting dollar than POP3 service, simply because you can keep your e-mail on a secure server accessible from anywhere on the 'Net rather than downloading it to your desktop. Also, many companies add server-side (meaning they do it before it ever involves you) anti-spam and anti-virus filtering, a feature that is unfortunately becoming increasingly valuable. E-mail capacity is less of a concern for businesses unless you're dealing with very large graphic or other multimedia files.

Next, we come to the most visible aspect of your business's Online Identity, your website. Essentially, a website is a group of files that a visitor's web browser requests and knows how to parse into something (hopefully) attractive, well-organized and useful. These files are typically HTML files (text files marked with special presentation instructions and links to graphics and other pages) and the graphic images (your logo, etc.) and they can be easy or difficult to edit, depending on the complexity of your site. Still more complex sites can be built up with scripting languages like PHP that interact with database engines on the server to generate sites dynamically.

There are, of course, powerful applications programs like Dreamweaver by Macromedia used to create these complex sites. A new trend, especially among the all-in-one hosting companies, is to offer some sort of "site builder" that allows you to plug in some basic information (your company name, logo, etc.), select a few parameters and, like magic, generate a lifeless, cookie-cutter website for your vibrant, unique enterprise.

To be fair, some of the template-based site builders generate relatively attractive sites and are fine if you don't mind your site looking like you bought it from a catalog (and they're a hundred-times better than paying your neighbor's 13-year-old son to hack something together). At the other end of the creative-control spectrum is the option of paying for site design; but this can be prohibitively expensive, especially for a home-based business. The trick is to find a happy medium that allows you to make changes to your own site without paying a geek $50/hr but that doesn't leave you with a bland site that scarcely does justice to the vision you have of how you want your business to be represented to the world. Here again, do your homework.

Finally, we come to an aspect of Online Identity that is important enough to render the others useless if not done right and that, it is often assumed, will somehow take care of itself. I'm talking about the marketing of your business on the Internet. Following the theme of learning what not to do, we'll go ahead and tell you, first and foremost, that nothing will increase the antipathy toward your business faster than unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE or "spam"). Just don't do it, and don't leave the online marketing of your site to companies that do, no matter how much they talk about their million opt-in addresses. If the marketing company intentionally misspells words like "fr'ee" in its own marketing campaign, it's a pretty safe bet that you don't need that company sending out mail to represent your business.

There is a whole industry that has grown up around website marketing, and many of these companies are simply not reputable or professional. Dealing with a reputable hosting company that is also set up to market your site is probably a safe bet. Again, research the companies in question beforehand to make sure they don't spam, don't deal in spyware/adware and don't use shady tactics like hijacking to obtain better search engine results.

The vast majority of website traffic is generated by the various search engines. People go to Google and search for "natural home cleaning in Columbia" or "unique Charleston folk-art" (to use the examples from last week's article) or whatever you want them to be searching for when they find your site, and your site pops up near the top of the results if you're lucky. That's the way it's supposed to work, and you achieve this result by making sure you have control over the "meta-tags" section of your website.

At the top of each web page, there is a header section that includes a title, a description, and a set of keywords enclosed by special "meta" tags that tell search engines about your site and how and when you want to be found. Editing these effectively is an art, and there are numerous tutorials and testing sites online to help you. We maintain a collection of links to these resources at Cafe ID (http://www.cafeid.com/res-over.shtml) for your benefit.

Another important aspect of website marketing is submitting your site to the appropriate sections of a number of important website directories, such as the Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.org). Submission to these directories can be a bit of a pain, but getting listed is worth it, as the search engines often use the information in these directories to build their own databases. You might even investigate paid inclusion in the better ones to get the ball rolling.

Affiliate programs, so-called "viral marketing" and actual paid advertising are three other avenues to generating visibility and traffic for your website, but those are beyond the scope of this article. Keep an eye on this space for information regarding establishing and maintaining an affiliate program and the best ways to approach advertising.

If all this sounds reads like gibberish, don't be too alarmed. The all-in-one hosting providers are willing and able to get this all done for you with minimal effort on your part. The only real question is how much you're willing to invest in doing it yourself or paying someone on your staff to make it the full-time job it can become. Doing it yourself offers a measure of satisfaction and puts the creative control in your hands, and that can be worth a good deal of money; but the range of options available for establishing and maintaining your business's Online Identity makes not doing so inexcusable.

About the Author

Trevor Zion Bauknight is a web designer and writer with over 15 years of experience on the Internet. He works with Cafe ID and specializes in the creation and maintenance of business and personal Online Identity and can be reached at trevor@cafeid.com.