Your Basic Website

What You Need to Know

For you to have a real online business that you own and control, a website is essential.

Although you can have a "business" based on social media and become an "influencer" with lots of followers, it's not a business you own and control. It's totally dependent on the social media platform it's hosted on and could disappear tomorrow as a result of a policy change that you have no control over.

Your Website is Your Business

Your website is your business identity and the address on the internet where you do business. You are in total control and can pack it up and move it to a different web host any time you want.

It's based on your domain name, but the actual business name can be different.

All this will become clear to you when I go through actually creating a website.

Here's an analogy with a bricks and mortar business:

Joe and Pam's Café occupies a building at 123 Goldilocks Boulevard.

Joe and Pam's Café is the business name and 123 Goldilocks Boulevard is the business address.

Unfortunately, Joe and Pam have a falling out and decide to go their separate ways. Pam buys out Joe's share.

Pam can change the business name to Pam's Café but she can't change the business address unless she actually moves the business somewhere else.

It's similar with an online business.

Business Name and Domain Name

You can change the business name to anything you like but the domain name is its address on the internet and can't be changed. You could, however, get a new domain and move your website to it, just as Pam could move her business to a new address.

Rule 1 is that to have a website you must have a domain name. How to get a domain name was covered in Module 3.

Domain Name and Web Host

Rule 2 is that to build a website, you must have somewhere to build it. All about web hosts and how to sign up with one was covered in Module 4.

So let's hop right into the lessons in this module and start building our first website.