Website Advantages

Websites and electronic communication provide businesses with competitive advantage. Properly planned, designed and implemented a website should pay for itself and providing a return on investment. Websites provide companies with large customer bases the ability to communicate more effectively.

A website hosted on a reliable, commercial web server has the advantage of being available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. By providing detailed product information, logically organized and well written customers are able to access information about new products, latest price lists, special promotions. Contact details are easily accessible and the website provides new business opportunities because people can search for your product and service using search engines, which index webpages.

Websites can also collect customer information and allows customers to sign up and order products and services. The need for administration is reduced.

Targeted Mailing Lists allow businesses to keep employees, customers, shareholders and investors up to date and maintain communication.

News on holiday trading times, sales, discontinued or new lines can be published online.

Environmentally friendly business, reducing the number of brochures that your company needs to produce

Importance of Domain Name Registration

A domain name is simply a unique address. Domain name servers hold the IP numbers of all registered websites and direct requests to the corresponding IP address. A domain name is as unique as a telephone number.

A domain name is extremely transportable. Even if you change your hosting company, you can arrange to have your domain name transferred to your new hosting company or server. Businesses should use the email address associated with their domain name and not their internet service provider. Once you terminate your service with your ISP, you cannot keep your email address. If however, you use the email address associated with your domain name, you could move anywhere in the world and keep the same email address.

We suggest that you choose a domain name that is easy for your customers to remember or branded to your company name. If you are a company, we suggest you choose a .com or .com.au.

Choosing between com or co.ke

If you are deciding between choosing a .com or .com.au you need to consider Google and search engines. For localized search having a .com.au is important. If you want to market to the world, then choose both .com and com.au.

You could develop 2 distinct websites or have the website resolve at the same website.One that markets to a global audience and one that is dedicated to the Kenyan market.

How does domain name country id affect search engines?

Search engines use either the domain name or the ip address of where the website is hosted to determine relevancy for local search. If you have a .com and host it in the US, your website will not be listed in search results for google Kenya. You will need to host your .com website in Kenya, for your website to appear in Google Kenya results. Alternatively, register a .co.ke and you can host your website overseas and it will still appear in Google Kenya.

Protecting your domain name

Some organisations even choose to register multiple domain names. If you do not register the equivalent .com top level domain name, anyone is free to register it and use it for their own purposes. Customers that inadvertently type in the com address will find themselves at the wrong website. Paypal.com should have registered the paypals.com domain name, because now the paypals.com domain name links straight to their competitors.

Organisations and networks

If you are an organisation, then a .org is more appropriate.

If your website, services a network of users, then a .net is an appropriate choice.

Generally, we would suggest that you avoid .tv or .biz. because these tags are not as recognized and it makes it easier for customers to remember your website address if it is a .com, .org or .net.