Which pages on your site are getting visitors and which are not?

Which search engines are bringing in traffic?

What key-phrases are being used?

By carefully monitoring these results, you can experiment with promotional campaigns, monitor results and hopefully refine your campaigns.

Its much harder to benchmark your site against rival sites, but there are a number of sites that can give you an approximate idea of other sites traffic such as Alexa, www.alexa.com

Alex uses activity of 100,000’s of users toolbars to record visits and shares this information on its website.

If your sites not showing up on Alexa, then use their add url feature http://pages.alexa.com/help/webmasters/

Select hosting package that best matches your requirements and budget. It’s usually best to start with a basic package than upgrade, hosting companies make most of their money by selling you space which you then don’t use.

Your hosting company will provide you with a username and password to allow you to FTP, File Transfer Protocol your site to hosting space.

If you’re using a hosting company other than your domain name registrar, you will need their Primary and Secondary DNS or Domain Name Settings, which take form of domain names e.g.

Ns1@asdasdasd.co.uk Ns0@asdadadsa.co.uk

Web Design

A great package to start out web designing is MS FrontPage; it follows format of rest of Microsoft office suite and is very reasonably priced and easy to pick up.

Once you’ve progressed with FrontPage then a more professional and sophisticated package to try is Macromedia Dreamweaver.

Once you have designed a site then simply select publishing option, enter domain name, your user name and password, and your site will FTP to your web-server.

Summary

That’s all there is too it. Getting a website up and live can be done in a matter of minutes, its worth mentioning that a new domain name and DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to get picked up by worldwide DNS system.