Everything these days is instantaneous. Planning events with friends, you’ll get answers within minutes of deciding to do something. You’ll hear from people you haven’t heard from in eons.
If you want to do something for business with the web, it’s in your best interest to keep up with all of these ideas. Part of needing that edge is to know what you need for your business or for your own general web presence. Do you have shows or exhibitions? A section of your page that you can log in to and edit that information yourself is helpful, especially if your website is controlled by a third-party.
The biggest question that gets asked, however, is: How much do you need to know?
Honestly, it depends on how involved you’d like to be with your own web presence. There are a couple levels of involvement:
- The Networking Website: If you’re only involved in maintaining your presence on things such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, or (God forbid), MySpace, then your knowledge of things such as HTML doesn’t really need to exist. You’ll mostly be incharge of keep information up to date, and posting every once and a while. Even putting up pictures isn’t at all tasking on these websites. Your real knowledge base here is to know: What is next? The biggest battle with networking sites is staying on top of what the next big networking site will be. And getting an account there as soon as possible.
- The Blog/Vlog: You still really don’t need to know much here. But this also depends on WHERE you keep your blog. If (like in my case here), you decide to use WordPress on your own domain, rudimentary knowledge of PHP and MySQL is required. However, if you don’t mind paying $13/month, WordPress is willing to fix that for you as well. In terms of vlogs, YouTube is actually really good at giving you the HTML imbed codes. Just make sure you switch your blog editor to “Edit HTML” and you’ll be all set.
- Web Domain and Hosting: It’s one thing to pay for your domain space and a host server. It’s actually pretty inexpensive (at least until you realize you’re paying for the whole year up front). $4/month is great until you multiply it by 12 and then add on security features and domain registration fees. Once you have that space though, you have to make sure you have something on it. And here’s where the line for knowledge splits. You can either hire someone to design the site for you (which is what most people do), or you can design the site yourself. FoxtrotFirefly.com is an example of what you can do with that space. (I used a WordPress page for the main page, but you can look at some of my straight up HTML projects which are also hosted on here as well.)
- Google Apps with Domain Registration: If you’ve ever been to my author page, then you’ve seen what can be done with Google Apps and having your domain registered through Google. You pay once yearly for the domain registration, and then Google does all the hosting for you. This is an inexpensive option, and honestly, if you don’t know squat about designing with HTML, it’s a good option because the design suite is actually quite simple. However, design options are limited with this, so be forewarned that it might not be in your best interest if you want a high tech website.
Hopefully this puts the World Wide Web in a bit more perspective. All you really have to do is be curious and try new things. But there’s ways around all of that if you know where to look, too.