1 Year Domain Registration for $1

[YouGotMyMoney]

Professional Email Addresses


How do the pros feel about setting up a domain, just so an agent can have a professional looking email:

[email protected]

instead of

[email protected]


If an agent isn't going to develop the site right away, and if a prospect went to acmehealthplans.com, wouldn't it look funny to the prospect, like " why doesn't this fella have a working website"?

 

[Robert Barney]

A Partner has a Vested Interest in your success. An enterprise has only an interest in their success.

Having had business partners many, many years ago, I can tell you that partnerships are the worst circumstances at the best of times. I'm married, one wife is enough.

I just want a spot on a friggin server and shouldn't have to sell my soul to get it.

The price one pays is based upon the needs of the website. Hosting Fees come down to needed bandwidth, disk space, email accounts, database features, etc..

Yeah, yeah, that's very entertaining. Now put some numbers on that rhetoric. I said a shared server can be had for under $100 per year, closer to $60 with godaddy. How does that sound to you? How much more would you suggest paying?

Technically a site can be down do to various reasons including a bug in the code that forces it down along with server and connection issues.

A bug in the code. Now we are into my area of expertise. A bug in the code does not take down a site when you least expect it. If the code is working, it will keep working. It doesn't have a mind of its own. If a web page is working today, it will work tomorrow unless you are changing it, and once you have your pages established, change is not something you need to do a lot.

My point exactly on the shared server part. The more sites on a server the more likely it is to go down do to the amount of complexities each site brings to the table.

Now you sound like Obama trying to push through healthcare. If we don't do this we'll go bankrupt.

Give me an example of code on one site, that takes down an entire server and everyone on it. It's never happened to me, and most of the servers I rent space on are shared. And I still maintain that if a server goes down, and it is servicing 50 web sites, it won't be just you screaming that the server is down. And if the IP is charing $60 per year, for 50 customers on that server, that's $3,000 per year the IP does not want to lose if they can't fix the problem. So anytime I have had a shared server go down, it didn't stay down very long. And the longest outages have not been due to server issues, it was because someone put a shovel through an optic cable somewhere. If that happens, I don't care what your site is hosted on, or how much you are spending for it, there isn't a thing your "partner" can do for you until the problem is fixed by someone that neither of you control.

So in picking a good partner, judge them on how they respond to downtime and issues, not the price point of the service they provide.

How to heck are you supposed to know how they respond to downtime and issues until you have downtime and issues, and you can't know that until you have chosen them.

Duh.

How about you do a google search of this:

"web provider reviews"

and then, once you have identified web hosting companies that people seem to like and have good experiences with (companies people aren't complaining about), you can narrow it down further by doing a google search of the company that you are thinking about using:

"godaddy hosting reviews"

That is going to tell you a lot more about the experiences people are having with hosting services than listening to some guy explaining to you why he needs to be your partner.

And price is important. If one company is charging you $60 per month, and another is charging you $60 per year, I would want to be certain the $60 per month was really what I needed and why the $60 per year won't cut it.

I may not be an "expert" on the internet, but I'm enough of an expert for about 97.5% of the agents out there who are thinking about putting up a web site. You can be dumb and spend a lot, or you can be smart and spend a little. It's up to you.



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Professional Email Addresses


How do the pros feel about setting up a domain, just so an agent can have a professional looking email:

[email protected]

instead of

[email protected]


If an agent isn't going to develop the site right away, and if a prospect went to acmehealthplans.com, wouldn't it look funny to the prospect, like " why doesn't this fella have a working website"?

WARNING: The domain name "acmehealthplans.com" is available. REGISTER IT NOW!

You have just told everybody else what you want, and somebody else is likely to register it on you. Go to godaddy and register it right now.

The first email address is WAY BETTER and worth $60 per year.

As for a home page at your domain name, I did a completely random search of "insurance agent lexington KY" to find an individual agent's web site. Didn't find a nice simple one I liked, but here was a PI's site that turned up:

Kentucky and Tennessee Private Investigators - KY & TN Detective Agency

Nice and simple - nothing fancy. Perfect for a first time site.

Nothing stops you from putting up a home page, that looks something like that, without the menu or anything else to begin with.

Once you have created the page, ongoing cost, about $60 per year.

 

[briko3]

Robert, is it bad to have a .org domain name, or should we focus solely on .com?

 

[Robert Barney]

Robert, is it bad to have a .org domain name, or should we focus solely on .com?

The first question is, why wouldn't you have a .com?

Usual answer, because someone already has it.

THEN DON'T get the same domain name as someone else only your's is .ORG. Because when you give out the domain name to other people they will immediately try the name with .COM after it and end up on someone else's web site.

The biggest joke used to be whitehouse.com, which went to a porn site - not anymore. But compare whitehouse.org with whitehouse.com.

So again, don't get a domain name that is .org because the one you like is already taken for .com.

And you can check the availablilty of domain names at godaddy.com.

 

[radiusbob]

.org domain extensions are usually geared towards non-profits.

 

[briko3]

Yeah, that's the general view...that they are for nonprofits. I bought one a while ago and was thinking about using it as a knowledge source. Have articles, etc. and have my contact info as well. I guess the idea would be more like becoming a trusted advisor.

Do you guys that have been doing this a while think that it would work or be a waste of time?

 

[Robert Barney]

Probably a wast of time.

What makes you think that most people know what a .ORG was originally intended for?

You will notice wikipedia is a .com, right?

 

[radiusbob]

A domain is what you market it as.

Love the Irony in your example (.org - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

 

[briko3]

That's the perception when I ask people. Technically, you can use it for whatever you want..commercial/nonprofit, etc.

 

[rayholt]

Tons of good points were made since I last checked in. Robert, you brought up some excellent points. Some things mentioned are also a little outdated and would pertain to web development in 2004, we're now approaching 2010.

Own your own domain name, Yes! Hence giving insight to the coupon code for you to use. Hosting your website yourself - doesn't really matter just as long as you get the site files when you pay the final installment on a website. Once I make all the last changes that are requested I put the entire site into a zip file and send it to my client, simple. Now they own it. All of my clients just host through me because for one, I include it free if they subscribe to a maintenance package, and two they have the site files so they could go anywhere they want to at any given time.

RadiusBob, you're exactly right. Hiring a student to do the work is probably not a good idea. My little brother just graduated college with the same degree as me, Business with an emphasis in Information Systems. He took web classes and everything and is extremely talented in art, but I wouldn't want him building an entire site. Although, some students are better than some of these marketing firms that are pumping out crap sites. The odds are just against you. It's like thinking you are going to find a good quality wife off of a craigslist personals ad, highly unlikely. (no offense to those that are currently searching for a wife there)

Insurance websites are another animal when it comes to web development. Something that is far out of the realm of student web designers. All a student will know is something anyone could pick up over a week on w3schools.com. Everyone these days think that cause they can use dreamweaver they know how to build a website. Unfortunately, some of these people are convincing and actually get clients and build crap. I'm actually working on a website/project in hopes to comb through the internet to get crappy websites on the internet redesigned and have them standards based and accessible to users with disabilities. I would tell you the name of it, but I don't release my website names until they are up and ready... which goes into have a professional email account without a website. So you are [email protected] but don't have your website up. Well get your website up! That's all I have to say about that. hotmail,aol, yahoo, comcast, earthlink email addresses have got to go. I don't trust them, and neither should you.

When it comes to partner vs. enterprise, I would consider myself a partner. I don't take on new clients just because I want their money, I make their business my business and take it on as if it were my own to help ensure it is successful.

Making a website shouldn't take months. I can complete a website in a matter of hours given certain conditions. It should take anywhere from 1-2 weeks, but if it is you that's lagging then yes it can take a couple of months. I'm on vacation right now and today alone I built two websites. One of which was just an idea from yesterday, woke up, bought the domain, put together the site. All it needs now is the content. If the content is already there, like for site redesigns, then it's usually pretty easy. The hard part sometimes is doing all the little tedious stuff, like 301 redirects for every single page from the old site to correspond to the new site to help preserve search rankings.

Well websites are no longer just documents online. They are web-based applications that are using databases to store content and populate it into a design. Content is supposed to be separate from design. Take LinkedIn for example. Every time someone wants to update their profile do they have to contact the webmaster at the site to make a change? Does them changing the appearance of the site affect your content? The answer is no, and this is how your website should be. The database driven websites I build allow a user to simply create content the same way this form is allowing us to post, and then I do the changes in the core codes when there needs to be additional functionality to the site or changes in the design.

So... the cost of a website you think is too much. Well if you don't want to spend a lot of money on a website that is pretty much equivalent to a 24/7 store front with a super employee there at all times who can run countless quote requests for you simultaneously, answer frequently asked questions, and take messages for you so they are waiting for you when you return to work all at the same time. Then maybe consider taking that money saved, investing in the development of a time machine so you can go back to a time to compete in the insurance industry without a good website.

Server downtime is not going to be cause by some error in your code. When servers go down it could just be a schedule maintenance that someone was unaware of or just a hardware issue.

SEO is amazing, as top ranking keywords are directly responsible for quite a few millionaires out there today. SEO is starting to be a scam though. Everyone talks about it like it's a wonder drug, and like everything else people see a way to exploit it and went with it selling "Guaranteed Top Rankings". When designing your site do not over look it and make sure your site is built with SEO in mind, but don't spend tons of money on it. Instead use PPC or hire a writer to create some valuable content for your site.

Wow, we are way off topic of $1 dollar domains. To sum things up, buy and own your own domain. Get a backup copy of the site files if you aren't hosting the site yourself. Get a website that is standards based. Which means to make sure the developer is using xhtml/css, not just an image that is sliced up and using tables as a layout. Look professional with a clean and simple design for your website & email address that is hosted on your domain. Don't hire a student other than to do cold-calling.

Well it's 3am in CA (5am where I am right now), I haven't proofread this so I'll have a chance to laugh at myself tomorrow morning with my grammatical errors. Writing and driving and two things I don't do well when tired.