Most of the business people we speak to on a daily basis are not large corporations. Many of them are run by one or two people, and some can not afford to buy a custom-designed, fully optimized website. Our motto is - You Gotta Start Somewhere!

This blog entry is a 101-level tutorial and guide to starting your company’s first real website.

To have a website you need three basic ingredients:
1. The Domain
2. The Design
3. The Host

Let’s start with the domain
A domain is the easy-to-read address that a person would type into the address bar. Duh, right? But it is a little more complicated than many people think. A domain is nothing unless it is connected to a set of files, which must be stored on a computer (a server). Unless you happen to have a web server in your living room (in which case you probably shouldn’t be reading an intro to owning a website) you are going to need to rent space on someone elses (a host). That will be covered shortly, but I mention it now because the space you rent on the computer also has an address (IP). This one isn’t so easy to read, however, and might look something like this: 192.168.1.1. So what your webhost will do is connect the two addresses. When someone types in the easy-to-remember address (URL) your browser (IE/Firefox) is told to go check out the digital version on the specified computer (server). Make sense? This is why most first-time webmasters opt - for good reason - to register their domain and get it hosted all in the same place. So for domain name registration, see the two companies I mention below.

The Design
You could hire a website designer to create for you a custom-built site with all of the bells and whistles, which can cost anywhere from $1,500 to $10,000 for a typical business. Those with shopping carts are usually more expensive than a site like www.firstpagefitness.com. But for those of you who fit the description supplied above, you often need to save your money and just want to get something online as soon as possible. This is understandable. Lucky for you, there are places like NetGuru that provide FREE Website Templates or extremely cheap ones, depending on whether or not you host your site with them.

Hosting Your Health and Fitness Website
You might decide to get one of their inexpensive website templates without the hosting option. I have no experience with their hosting plans, but I have had quite a few sites hosted with iPowerWeb Hosting and Host Gator , both of which have hosting plans as low as a few dollars per month.

There are many other aspects that go into running a successfull healthcare, health or fitness website. Among them are search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing , and PPC advertising . But you can worry about those another day…