process – Tech Warrior

What is website hosting?

Judson Dawtrey — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 00:30:00 +0000

When you get a website developed you might hear your chosen web design company mention something about website hosting. If you are building a website yourself, you will most likely start out by looking for website hosting. In this article we explore what website hosting is.

In short: Website hosting is a service offering that enables people who have a website to put it on the internet and make it available for visitors to engage with.

Hosting and service providers

A website hosting provider, sometimes called a service provider, offers space and specialised software on a dedicated computer, connected to the Internet. This computer (or server) makes it possible for the content of a website to be stored and viewed in an expected way to anyone visiting the website.

Purchasing domain names carefully is a very important aspect of owning a website. Having a website is an important part of running a business. Make sure you are the rightful registered owner of your domain name.

Different types of hosting exist. These are distinguished by the technology that is used for the server, the management level provided, as well as the additional services on offer by a specific website hosting service provider. The most common types of hosting are shared hosting, dedicated hosting and VPS hosting. In both instances the hosting provider manages access to where the servers or computers are physically or geographically stored.

Shared hosting

Shared web hosting is when your website is placed on the same server as many other sites. Think of it like your office in an open plan environment. The websites all share the server’s resources such as memory and computing power. This type of website hosting is usually offered with additional basic services covering things like the amount of disk space that can be used and a set number of email addresses. It is usually offered in a tiered structure that is fixed. If more resources or features are needed then the next tier offering would be used at a greater cost. It is up to the website developer to decide on the best tier for the hosting when the website is first built.

Dedicated hosting

Dedicated hosting is when you get access to an entire server and do not share it or its resources with anyone else’s website. This is the most expensive option and is chosen when the website is very busy or is for a large corporate, like a bank, who needs complete control of their server. The client is fully responsible for all security, software and maintenance of the dedicated server.

VPS Hosting

VPS hosting (where the VPS stands for Virtual Private Server) is the middle ground between shared hosting and dedicated hosting. Think of it like having an entire floor of your own in the building. You still share resources with others in the building but you are not in an open plan environment where you share the floor space. This option also requires less technical expertise to set up and maintain.

Self-managed hosting or built into the package

If you are building your own website using a service like GoDaddy, Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, or WordPress.com, they will offer hosting built in as part of the website design and development process.

At Tech Warrior we manage the hosting of your website as part of our Small Business Websites product.

Don’t worry about people stealing your design work. Worry about the day they stop.
—Jeffrey Zeldman

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Can I change what the website looks like?

Tristan Green — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 00:30:00 +0000

Customising your website

"Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black." said Henry Ford of the Model T. The Model T Ford, generally regarded as the first affordable car in America only came in black. This was so quality vehicles could be produced in an efficient and affordable way.

Tech Warrior uses the same principles - quality, efficiency, affordability. It streamlines the building or development process so the client gets a good looking, robust website that matches and supports the needs of the small business and doesn’t cost a fortune.

If you choose one of our Small Business Websites products then you will be able to make some changes to the way the website looks but you won’t be able to have a bespoke, custom, built-from-scratch website that looks unlike anything else out there.

The reason Tech Warrior doesn’t generally offer a fully customised website relates to cost and time for both us and the client. As the adage goes, we’ve been around the block, more than a few times over the past 25 years, consequently our Small Business Websites product is designed to be contained, fast and reliable.

There isn’t toing-and-froing between both parties, our trusty sales and support team guide our clients through the content building process helping them produce some of the best content around. It may seem like a laborious task which requires an investment of time, but in practice the content for the website comes easily.

What is the best WordPress theme for my website?

Matthew Green — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 10:02:50 +0000

There’s a difference between best and popular. Just because something is popular doesn’t make it the best. And, often, something that is the best might not always be the most popular. The same applies when it comes to choosing a WordPress theme for your website. In this article I’ll show you how to decide what the best WordPress theme is for you.

Before choosing a theme for your website it’s useful to answer the following questions.

What kind of website do I want for my business?
How much am I willing to spend?
What is my website experience level?

What kind of website do I want for my business?

Are you just starting out with a website for your business? Is it a do-over, refresh or upgrade? What about adding in extra functions, like an online shop? Planning is key when it comes to doing anything. You wouldn’t build a house without a plan and your website is the same. Spending time upfront getting clear on what your needs are will stand you in good stead down the line.

The expert at anything was once a beginner.
—Helen Hayes

Get clear on what the theme must do for your website. WordPress started out as a tool for blogging and has since evolved into a powerful website management system that runs 34 percent of all websites on the Internet. If you can imagine it, there’s a good chance that you can build that kind of site with WordPress. There’s a but though. The more sophisticated and intricate you want a website to be, the more you will impact the next two factors - cost and experience.

Brainstorm and get as much detail on what your website must do for you and your business. Look at what you want the website to do now, in six months and a year. And then plan for that. At this stage don’t worry about the how. Just get clear at a high level on what your expectations are. Product sales? Weekly updates? Membership of a group or club? And so on.

How much am I willing to spend?

Once you have a clear idea of what the website must do the next step is to consider costs. You can get a free WordPress theme or you can pay for a theme. Theme cost is not the only consideration when it comes to working out a website budget. How much of the website building or development are you doing yourself? How much will you have to get someone else to do? What about where the website will live (be hosted)? Again, it’s useful to make a list and plan so that you can see very clearly all the costs that go into a website. Do you have a logo and colour scheme for the website?

Once you know what your overall website budget is, you can decide more easily how much you want to spend on the theme? Does the budget have room for a fancy theme, with lots of features, or do you have to scale down your expectations a bit?

What is my website experience level?

Nowadays WordPress is much simpler to use than when it started out in 2003. There is still a learning curve involved though. You will need some level of understanding when it comes to the jargon of website development. You will come across terms like domain name registration, hosting, PHP, themes, responsive design, browser compatibility and SEO.

Do you know what they mean? If not, are you prepared to make the investment in learning what they are about? If your business is better off with you at the steering wheel and you can’t take the time to become familiar with these terms, considering a third-party professional website developer to help with the development of your website is a good option.

Much like a recipe there’s an order for putting a website together. Again, things are much easier now than back in the day (1994) when we started out but you will still need to go through the various steps in the correct order. Can you afford to take the time to work them out?

Great theme developers and companies offer dedicated support to assist with their theme and getting it up and running. What happens if something else goes wrong? Can you fix the problem? If not, do you know where to turn for general website help and support?

How to choose the best WordPress theme for my website?

When it comes to picking a theme for your site this usually means you are going the DIY route with the development of your website. Spend some time planning and deciding how much you know and are prepared to learn. Thereafter go through the areas and questions outlined above and you will be well placed, within budget, to make the best choice for you and your business when it comes to choosing the best WordPress theme. Alternatively, you can consider using a professional web development company like Tech Warrior, who have developed a custom website theme that sits at the foundation of all Small Business Websites.

How many months would it take to build a website?

Tristan Green — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 10:48:39 +0000

After months of brainstorming, dreaming, planning and developing you are ready to launch your business to the world. You have the company name registered, the bank account opened, the funding available and the services and products ready to be sold. But wait, you need a logo.

You know that your logo is going to be the face of your business and the launch pad of your brand identity. Maybe one day people will instantly recognise your company by its font, colours and symbol/s. This is big, this is important. You need to brief a designer. But where the hell do you start?

Know what you want from the word 'go'

If you wished to write a story and chose the short story format, this would equate to roughly 5,000 to 10,000 words whereas if you went the novel route this would be roughly 50,000 to 70,000 words. Same story but the difference between the two is apparent. One is much lengthier, while the other may be brief and to the point. One has a more fleshed-out plot while the other doesn’t beat about the bush.

The same goes for websites. If you have a website that only needs one page to tell your story, this can take a developer just a few hours to complete. If, on the other hand, a website needs to have more pages to display a range of products or tell a more detailed story, this will take a developer longer to complete. Each of these pages could need to be designed differently. This could take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to complete.

How detailed the website needs to be

When I mention detail, I’m talking about the ‘fancy pants’ effects you can add to your site. I’m talking about using realistic drop shadows so that the images lift or pop off the page. Or the illuminated hover effect when the visitor moves over a button with their cursor. All of the tiny, ‘flashy’ elements can take time to implement.

If your budget caters for it, why not? Expect to have the website up a little bit later, but it’s going to be a visually amazing end product.

If you choose to have your logo designed by Tech Warrior we provide a Logo briefing document shared online for our clients to complete. It guides you through the process and makes it that much easier to think through the elements required. As with anything, however, you get out what you put in. Make sure what you put in is clear and focused.

Hard coded vs themes and templates

I’ve spoken about the difference between hard coding a site and using WordPress’ themes and templates in a previous article. It really is a fundamental part of the building process.

Using templates and themes may mean certain aspects of your site bear similarities to others’ but you can get your site up faster than someone sitting writing out lines of code. There is also far less margin for error when you use themes and templates. These are prebuilt for you, so you know it works.

Events beyond the control of the developer

This hits a little too close to home for me. Recently I had a really bad run-in with technology. My computer failed on me which resulted in my hard drive and memory needing to be replaced and with that I lost a whole bunch of data. Thankfully we store backups so getting everything back again wasn’t that big of a sweat, it just took a long time. The malfunctions I experienced set me back nearly two weeks.

Unfortunately, hardware malfunctions are something we might all experience at some point, and in the context of the article it can add to the time it takes to build a website.

If people like you, they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you.
—Zig Ziglar

Receiving content from the client

This is possibly the single biggest thing impacting the length of time it takes to build a website. A website structure is relatively easy to create. Populating it with the appropriate branding, colours, content and products is what takes time. It especially takes a long time if the client delays the supply of any parts of the content or wants to make too many revisions to the content.

Certain measures can be put in place to help structure the content delivery process from a client to the developer. Additionally a developer needs to stick to the agreed deadlines. The key thing is commitment from the client when it comes to delivering all the content needed on time and in a format that can be worked with. Retyping handwritten documents is nobody’s idea of a good time. Neither is resizing images when the right dimensions were previously agreed to. Things like this can really add to the time it takes to build a website. Not to mention the possible added expense.

Number of changes or edits

If a client wants images to be changed and text to be edited, it needs to be done. However, people sometimes don’t know when to stop making these changes and clients sometimes try and change everything. This can be a challenge to manage and comes down to clear guidelines and boundaries around the scope of the website project. Some developers don’t charge for these edits, which can come back to bite them in the long run. Those clients who don’t know what they want tend to push the boundaries by not adhering to conventional office hours or making mass edits and changes.

One definitive way to prevent this from happening is to clear up any ambiguity around how many changes and edits form part of the initial website build. Thereafter clear communication on how much changes and edits will cost and how long they will take is also important. This way clients are left in the dark about how the process works.

How many months does it take to build a website? As I mentioned at the start of the article, it’s really an open ended question.

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How long does it take to build a website?

Tristan Green — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 14:13:09 +0000

Tech Warrior gets asked a host of questions from potential customers, friends and people interested in wanting to learn more about websites. One of the more frequent questions the Tech Warrior team gets asked is, "How long does it take to build a website?"

While people want a definitive, time-based answer it isn’t always possible. In almost all cases, there are things which a web developer needs in order to complete the build on a website.

Website agreement or contract

First and foremost, an agreement needs to be reached between the service provider, in this case Tech Warrior, and the client. This agreement outlines the type of product or service the customer is purchasing. In the case of Tech Warrior, the agreement is primarily about the type of Small Business Websites package that is chosen and whether it is a new website or a takeover and redo of an old website.

Website deposit

Before any work can commence a deposit is required to be paid by the client. This is done as a way of solidifying the agreement between the parties. How long this step takes is completely dependent on the customer – if the customer pays the deposit shortly after the agreement "phase", work can commence almost immediately. Provided the content has been supplied, of course.

Content for the website

Content is something many web developers struggle to get and can delay the website project. In most cases the previous two phases take place rapidly without delay. However, getting client content, be it media or text, often takes the longest amount of time; the adage hurry up and wait comes to mind!

A logo is a must. It guides the colour and font choices. No logo, no website. Tech Warrior offers logo design services but the client can use anyone. The design of a logo could delay building the website.

Once again, the length of time it takes a customer to deliver the balance of the content will impact how long the website building process takes. If content is not delivered all at one time, delays will occur while waiting for the required photos, text, quotes, etc.

In an effort to combat lengthy wait times, Tech Warrior has developed an online scope document which clients populate with their content. All the content must be provided before development work can start. In this way Tech Warrior is able to guide the client to generate the best content for their website.

While the client is compiling the content, Tech Warrior generates colour palettes based on the client's logo. Various inspirational images and colours that resonate well with the client are taken into consideration. The choice of the colour palette will determine the colour scheme of the website. No work can start until this choice has been made either.

Website structure or skeleton

There are numerous ways to develop or build a website, one of the original ways is hardcoding or programming. This is when someone experienced in programming sits and writes out lines and lines and lines of code… Tech Warrior decided this wasn’t something we wanted to do.

At Tech Warrior we build all our websites using WordPress, the most widely used website and blog builder on the Internet. WordPress on its own isn’t as powerful or customizable as some of the others out there. Tech Warrior also uses Beaver Builder which allows us to use the skeleton site structure that comes with WordPress and we can add in all those nifty floating images, slideshows, moving galleries and responsive hover effects. All of which takes a quarter of the time it takes to hard code a site. Plus Beaver Builder is also rock-solid and backed by a great team of developers.

Website customisation

While it doesn’t take us as long to build a site compared to hardcoding or other ways of building a website, it does mean that you get a website that has a similar structure to other sites, the website is not custom designed from the ground up.

As mentioned previously, Tech Warrior strives to deliver websites as fast as possible. 25 years of designing and building websites has taught us what works. We have developed a core website structure and together with our customers we customise this core website to fit their business and brand. The media and written content is then added making the site effectively complete.

The upside to this approach is you aren’t a guinea pig for the latest web fad or design trend. Plus it is better value for money. A comparable website will usually cost two or three times as much. This type of strategy enables us to get a website up and running in much less time - provided we have all the content, that is!

So how long does it take to build a website?

To develop a new website through Tech Warrior can take anywhere from one week to a month to complete. Because content delivery can be the handbrake to delivering a website quickly, Tech Warrior has made it as easy as possible to provide the required content quickly and effortlessly which helps speed up the development process and gives the client a quality, mobile friendly website in no time.

Visit our learning hub for more articles

The post How long does it take to build a website? appeared first on Tech Warrior.

process – Tech Warrior

What is website hosting?

Hosting and service providers

Shared hosting

Dedicated hosting

VPS Hosting

Self-managed hosting or built into the package

Can I change what the website looks like?

Customising your website

Further reading

What is the best WordPress theme for my website?

What kind of website do I want for my business?

How much am I willing to spend?

What is my website experience level?

How to choose the best WordPress theme for my website?

Further reading

How many months would it take to build a website?

Know what you want from the word 'go'

How detailed the website needs to be

Hard coded vs themes and templates

Further reading

Events beyond the control of the developer

Receiving content from the client

Number of changes or edits

How long does it take to build a website?

Website agreement or contract

Website deposit

Content for the website

Website structure or skeleton

Website customisation

So how long does it take to build a website?