Since, you now have proper understanding of logical and physical design for your website, you can start thinking about how to go bout building the website. Depending on the budget available, you have various options.
These options starts from building everything to outsourcing everything. In outsourcing, to provide the services involved in building website outside vendor is hired instead of using in-house resource.
Another option that you have to make is whether the website is hosted at your company’s own server or the hosting is outsourced to web host provider.
These choices are independent of one another, but are considered at the same time.
There are few outside vendors available you will design, build and host you website, while other vendors will either host or build you website, but will not do both. Fig. 2.2.2 show the options available.
Build Your Own Vs Outsourcing
There are various choices available, if you have chosen to build your own website. For creating your website, you should make use of pre-built website template available unless you are skilled enough. For instance, Yahoo Aabaco Small Business (formerly known as Yahoo Stores)provides website templates which requires you to insert only graphics, text and other required data along with infrastructure to run a e-commerce website after it is created.
WordPress is less costly and most commonly used website building tool. It has an advance content management system. A database software which is designed for managing structured and unstructured data and different object in the website environment, is known as Content Management System (CSM). It give a centralized control structure to manage content of website to web designers and managers.
WordPress also have number of in-built widgets and plug-ins which you can use to extend website functionality. Revenue-generating ads, affiliates, and sponsors are the major sources of revenue for WordPress websites.
Website building tools similar to WordPress are provide by wix, weebly and google sites. These are few less costly options to create a website, while these are restricted to the functionality and look and feel provided by the templates and infrastructure provided by these third party vendors.
In case you have proper knowledge and experience of programming, then you can opt for building the website yourself from scratch. There are various types of tools available, some tools like Microsoft visual studio and Adobe dreamweaver helps to build everything from scratch, while some prepackaged website building tools are available which can create an advanced website which is custom-built as per your requirement. Fig. 2.2.3 shows different tools available for building website.
There are number of risks involved in building your website on your own. Provided the complexity of functionality like credit card authentication, shopping cart, payment processing, order processing and inventory management, the cost will be higher, as are the risk of performing poor job.
As you will be rebuilding the kind of website which other specialized firms have already developed, and your staff may require longer time which would delay your entry in the market. Because of all this you efforts can fail. On the brighter side, you might be better able to develop a website which has all the functionality that you want and more importantly you will learn the art of developing in-house, which will help you in case you need to make some changes because of change in business strategy.
In selected to purchase more costly site- building packages, then you will be buying the software which is tested under all circumstances. By this you can enter into market sooner. However, to make proper choice, you will need to evaluate multiple software which can take long time. You might want to customize the package as per your requirement and perhaps you will hire another vendor to do customization work. As the number of customization increases, the cost associated with it also increase.
In the past, traditional retailers who wanted an e-commerce website have developed the website by themselves, as the had skilled staff and had high budget to invest on the IT capes like telecommunications and database. However, as the e-commerce application have become more advance, the larger retailer nowadays depend on third party vendor to fulfill their website related needs.
Small startup firms might build their own website from scratch using the in-house technical resources in order to keep the expenses low. Medium-size startup firms may buy site design and technical expertise from outside vendor.
Host Your Own Vs Outsourcing
Majority of businesses opt to outsource hosting of their website and pay vendor to host their website, this means it is responsibility of hosting company to make sure the website is live 24x7. By opting to pay monthly rental for hosting, the businesses don’t have to worry about many associated technical aspects.
You can even opt to co-locate. In co-location facility, your company buys or takes on lease a web server but the server is located at vendor’s premises. Maintenance of communications line, facility and machinery is taken care by vendor. Co-location has expanded with the expansion of virtualization where one server is capable of operating multiple websites at a time with multiple OS and which has multiple processors. In such cases, you do not purchase the server but rent its capabilities on monthly basis.
Below is list of major hosting/ cloud service provides :
Bluehost
Azure
Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2
Godaddy
SoftLayer(IBM)
Hostway
Rackspace
Verizon Cloud.
Co-location involve renting space for hardware, so you can consider renting virtual space on cloud service provider’s infrastructure. Since the cloud services are reliable and less costlier, it is taking place of co-location. Contrary to co-location, hardware is not owned by your firm. Cloud service providers provides virtual technology, standard infrastructure and pay as per usage billing system.
As the cost of servers are falling very fast, the cost of hosting is also decreasing. Also telecommunications costs have also fallen. Due to this, most of hosting service provider wants to be different than other hosting providers by providing various ad-on services like marketing, design of site, optimization and other services.
There are number of drawbacks in outsourcing hosting. In case you opt for a vendor, ensure that you select such a vendor which have the capability to grow along with you. You will also need to understand type of security provisioned for taking backup copies of your website, activity monitoring and security track record.
Many fortune 500 companies own their private cloud data centers in order to control the web environment. Diversely, if you are small company, there are various risk involved in hosting you own website. You cost will go high than in case you opted for outsourcing hosting, since being a small firm you will not have that much power to procure low cost telecommunication and hardware.
You will need to procure software and hardware, have a space to setup hardware infrastructure, rent telecommunication lines, developing security & backup policy and hire a staff yourself.
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