The following is the flowchart of website ownership

1. Buy a domain name

The domain name is yournamein.com. This is purchased from a registrar like the International Internet Authority and is annually renewable. If you let it expire someone else can buy it. In fact there's a whole industry built around "expiring domain names." If you search on any engine for "expiring domain names" you will see what I mean. Name registrations can be made for a minimum of 1 year and for a maximum of 10 years at a time.

2. Buy webhosting

Webhosting is the space on a server that processes your e-mail and makes your webpages visible to the public. Without it, all you have is a name. To continue with the analogy of a business name registration, when you walk out the door of the Registrar General's Office all you have is a piece of paper called a Certificate of Registration. You need space from where to work. This in the tangible world would be called an office even if it's a home office. In the online world this is your webhost. You 'point' your domain name to your webhost and the server at the webhost responds when somebody types in http://www.yourNAMEin.com as well as when somebody sends an e-mail addressed to you@yournamein.com. Webhosting is like an annual rent, very much in the same way you would pay a lease rent to your landlord for an office.

There are literally thousands of webhosts around so it's not impossible to find all kinds of strange offers. The rule of thumb we suggest is that if it sounds too good to be true, it is. With cheap or worse 'free' solutions, you may find that you don't get your e-mail, your website goes down for long periods or you're getting spyware on your system. Somebody always pays in the end. Nothing is free. Having said that, you will also find that no webhost is perfect but some are less perfect than others. During over 10 years in this business, we have used 8 international webhosts and have found that they will all have downtime but the key is to find and stick to the one that has the least.

3. Design the website

This is fairly straightforward. This is when someone translates what you want your website to look like into HTML, the language in which webpages are written.

4. Update the website

Keeping your website up-to-date used to be a task reserved for technicians who write HTML. Now, we have user-friendly software known as Content Management Systems (CMS). These allow anyone with basic computer knowledge to add texts, pictures, links and more. Some training may be required but with CMS, you end up saving thousands of dollars. Previously, you would have had to pay a technician by the hour to update your website. Again, there are free CMS and paid-for CMS. The free ones are usually never free. You end up paying when your website goes down and no one is obliged to help you get it back up because you're not paying for support.

5. Promote the website

This ball is very much in the court of the website owner. A website is like a telephone number. If you don't give it out, no one will call you. Someone may call you by accident and you'll find yourself saying very often, "Sorry, you have the wrong number." To promote your website, you should use both online and offline methods. Go ahead and submit your website to the search engines but bearing in mind that you're competing with millions of people around the world to get indexed in the search engines, you should also plaster your web address on every piece of stationery you print. Let it be seen wherever and whenever you display your logo. Also, never underestimate the power of word-of-mouth marketing and simple strategies like promotional products.

6. Evaluate and renew

Without a doubt, after your first year of website ownership, you would have learnt a lot. This is a good time to evaluate what you did right, what you did wrong and what you can do better. Implement some of the positive changes you think you can make to your website.