Web Site III

Now that your business is up and running, you need that web site. You're going to register your own domain name and get a virtual host. You're going to run e-mail off your site, have some forwarded to certain employees and have auto-responders. Your going to use the site as an electronic filing cabinet with a password-protected part for internal documents and a part for customers to download information. Part of the site will be designed so it can be printed out for instant brochures and there will be e-mail forms for customers to submit requests. Of course you'll want detailed access statistics or, at least, access to your logs and image maps, secure servers and mailing lists would be nice. Finally, you're going to make this a site that will have a general relevance to businesses in your field and then sell space to suppliers and customers.

What does all this mean?

Have a look at the list of virtual hosts on budgetweb. The virtual host list is a list of companies specializing in hosting virtual domains, i.e. a domain which is registered in your name — "yourname.com." The list gives pricing and details of services offered by the host.

To run e-mail, you'll need the ability to set up POP mail boxes to collect mail sent to info@yourname.com, sales@yourname.com etc. You'll also need to be able to program auto-responders so that e-mail sent to info@yourname.com is automatically answered with an e-mail information package. Finally, you'll want to be able to forward some of the e-mail to other e-mail addresses for processing.

To use the site as an electronic filing cabinet you need the ability to password-protect certain directories. There will be the public parts of the site which are un-protected and contain your web pages; the semi-public parts which contain information for customers which they can access with a password given to customers; and the private parts of the site which contain internal documents such as customer lists, calculation programs, memos and directives and which can be downloaded as needed by your employees and representatives. Truly sensitive documents should also be encoded.

E-mail forms and several other features such as counters and guestbooks require cgi capabilities. While you can always use the free services which provide such functions, a good host should provide these internally for greater speed and reliability. Check whether standard cgi scripts are included in the hosting and which ones. Form processing capabilities are vital and formmail.pl is one of the best scripts.

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