1. SOME HISTORY

I grew up playing around with computers. Anything in that machine would be interesting to me. Playing solitaire, drawing figures on the Paint Tool, and helping my uncle to register ISBN numbers for his books’ new business. It didn’t really matter. Any excuse to use the magical box would be a proper excuse. The most expected days were weekends because I could access the internet. The Internet meant researching for school homework was fun, and surfing on YouTube was amazing. When I was about ten years old, my dad started to study how to build a website as a hobby. He didn’t only learn for himself, but he would spend hours explaining to my older sister and me what he was trying to achieve and what his result was. All that interactions were so funny and interesting. Little by little, we started to get involved. At first, cleaning the background of some images in photoshop, later uploading files to a managed system, spontaneously did animations with Flash software, and without realizing it, we were building websites together with dad. To grow up working is not something recommended, and most of the time not allowed around the world. Still, it worked for me as a trial time. I could try the profession and have a clear decision about what I wanted to study at university. I graduated in systems for the internet in 2014 and made my career working with the internet. Working as Head of marketing in SYNTRE, I realized much knowledge is not obvious to everyone as it is to me, so I decided to share about the process of putting up a website on the internet.

2. SYNTRE’S WEBSITE

At first, I thought of showing some technical skills or how to create a website in 5 minutes because that’s what we show in workshops to demystify the idea that software development is hard. Thinking a little further, I thought it might not benefit a business community. So why not use our team SYNTRE’s website as an example? When the marketing team started to build it, we wanted to create something so basic that everyone on our team could modify it and still be stunning to match the diverse and international stunning team we have. I think it’s a great example because I can walk you through our real struggles and show that even an experienced software developer faces difficulties, and it is okay if this stress you out. Hopefully, after this essay, you can have a better understanding of how to get things done.

2.1 STEP BY STEP

I’ll break down the process into four parts. Registering domain, contracting hosting provider, website up and running, and the use of professional emails under your registered domain. The focus will not be to develop the website itself but to manage to have it online. A website is something dynamic and alive that needs updates and changes from time to time. So, it doesn’t help much if I explain the tendencies and ways of doing it if it will change in about a year.

2.1.1 REGISTERING DOMAIN

This is a step people tend to get confused and scared about the prices while it’s the nicest and easiest step to get done. There are multiple registering domain companies Host Monster, Just Host, Green Geeks, Go daddy, etc. If you try to register a small-size length name such as “syntre”, you will find a relatively expensive price. This happens because the companies have already “bought” these domains, and they are selling forward for a more expensive value to you. A great way of getting around this “issue” is to register the domain under a country.  For example, in Brazil, we use “.com.br” and in Finland, we use simply “.fi.” In the photo below, you can see a simulation of registering the domain www.syntre.com.

FIGURE 1 – Price when trying to purchase the domain “www.syntre.com”

The price is in Brazilian REAL currency because I was in Brazil while writing this essay. To make your life easier, I already calculated, and after converting the currency, we would need to pay something around two thousand euros. Well, we don’t want to pay such a high price just to have our face on the internet. You can see that the platform also offers some variations around the wanted name at a more affordable price. We are a Finnish company targeting the Finnish market, so using .fi would not be an issue, so we went ahead and purchased syntre.fi domain. We checked many Finnish registering domain services, and the most affordable was Hosting Palvelu paying a total of 11.25e for one year.

FIGURE 2. Hosting Palvelu – Company used to register SYNTRE’s domain

2.1.2 CONTRACTING HOSTING PROVIDER

Wait. If I registered a domain on a website called “Hosting Palvelu”, do I also contract to host service on the same website? The answer is yes and no. Here is the tricky part. Due to the lack of people’s knowledge, these providers try to offer all the services in one place so that you end up paying a great price instead of a cost-benefit. In Hosting Palvelu, a plan that would cover the minimum needs of our website costs 10e per month. We would need to invest 120e to have our website up and running for a year (Hostingpalvelu.fi, 2022), and this is not something we predicted in the initial project budget presented to the leadership. The marketing team dug into hosting service research to find the best, safe, and most affordable option. At first, we decided to work with Blue Host, but it didn’t work because our debit card was not accepted as a payment form. Second, we understand that the mailboxes were not included in the monthly payment, and we dreamt about having professional SYNTRE accounts such as “thais@syntre.fi.” Our final call was then DreamHost.

FIGURE 3. Chosen hosting provider, DreamHost

In the chosen plan, we have the right to unlimited websites, free domain included, unlimited traffic, WordPress pre-installed, fast SSD Storage, free SSL certificate, and unlimited Email, which was our main requirement. The online reviews were good, and we are paying $2.95 per month (DreamHost, 2022). So far, it has been smooth to work with DreamHost.

One important step is to redirect the nameserver from the default hosting service to the company where you registered your domain. In our case, after updating it looked like this:

FIGURE 4. Changing nameserver to the correct registered domain path.

2.1.3 THE WEBSITE IS UP AND RUNNING

As said in the beginning, we wanted something simple and beautiful. To do so, we are using the CMS WordPress, and we bought a professional template that includes many different layouts ready to be applied to our website. We bought the AVADA theme and installed the template to our WordPress that was already installed by the hosting company. Piece of cake.

FIGURE 5. Purchasing Avada WordPress theme

PICTURE 6. Theme Avada installed to the WordPress

That’s it, now we can play around with the intuitive website builder without any software development skill. We got a good discount on the theme purchase because we got it during black Friday.

2.1.4 PROFESSIONAL EMAILS

Also, as pointed out before, it was important for the SYNTRE team that all our team individuals and departments would have a professional email. For this step, you could contract an email hosting company such BlueHost, Google Workspace, etc. Although, we picked DreamHost beforehand in the website hosting process, including this service as well. So, we just needed to access the email registering page and add all our wished accounts.

 PICTURE 7. Adding email addresses to DreamHost

2.2 GOLD TIP

Remember to remove your registered payment card from the contracted companies’ websites. You paid for a year, and they likely have an automated renewal after the contracted period. Do remove it now not to get a surprise bill. Close to the expiring date, they will send you a review offer, and it’s up to you to keep hosting on the same platform or to get a new one.

PICTURE 8. Removing payment card from website platforms

3. CONCLUSION

In this text, we walked through the basic steps of applying my knowledge to create a very basic and quick website. There are different forms and different tools to be used. Nowadays, you can find basic steps to advanced tutorials on developing online applications on free platforms like YouTube. If this is an area you are interested in, let’s have a coffee and share ideas. Don’t limit your skills, go ahead, and give it a shot!

4. REFERENCES

Avada Quick Start Guide (2022) ThemeFusion | Avada Website Builder. Available at: https://theme-fusion.com/documentation/avada/getting-started/avada-quick-start-guide/#get_hosting (Accessed: December 6, 2022).

Web hosting with top customer service (2022) Hostingpalvelu.fi. Available at: https://www.hostingpalvelu.fi/en/web-hosting/ (Accessed: December 6, 2022).

WordPress starter hosting: Choose from hundreds of themes (no date) DreamHost. Available at: https://www.dreamhost.com/wordpress/shared-wp-hosting/ (Accessed: December 6, 2022).