First Technical Steps to managing your own business
Before you leave your current job to become independent,
consider the following:
1.
Don't leave before you have a
website
2.
Don't leave before you have an "official"
email address
3.
Don't leave before you have a
business card
4.
Don't leave before you have your
first client (hopefully)
Don't leave before you
have a business card
And a business card needs to have your website on it, and a
real email address (not GMail).
There are numerous sites on the web that can help print
business card, so don't even think about printing the thing on your home
printer. It never comes out as well as you'd like, and the paper quality is
minimal. You want something that says professionalism, not "home made".
How do I get a domain?
I used godaddy.com to
get a domain name for less than $10 a year. Don't bother paying more for the
advanced email services there though - we'll talk about options for managing
your emails in a bit.
Should I get a ".com" domain
or one for my own country?
I live in Israel but I didn't get a "co.il" address. The main
reason being that ".com" is much easier to remember and is more intuitive, and
the second being that in most browsers, writing a word such as "cnn" and then
clicking "Ctrl-Enter" you get automatic completion to ".com". It's easier to
get to your site if it's ".com". if you
used ".net" for example, people would constantly be confused and try to go to
[yoursitename].com first and only then to ".net". Hasn't this ever happened to
you?
How do I manage my
domain(s)?
When you register a domain at a registrar such as
GoDaddy.com they let you manage the domains you have with them, including
setting the nameservers, email forwarding and everything else you'd need. That
can lead to several potential problems though:
-
If you have domains with more than
one registrar you have to manage all that from multiple sites, each with its
own interface, passwords and more
-
The sites usually contain a
heavyset UI that includes many things you don't need and many "offers" that
come up when all you want to do is manage your email account settings.
The best thing I did right after I got my first domain was
to register a free account with ZoneEdit.Com.
It's a site dedicated to managing your DNS's, domains forwarding, email
forwarding, IP addresses, email server and MX records, and anything that has to
do with how you want to wire up your various domains and sub domain names. The idea is this:
-
You Add your new domain to you
zoneedit.com account (you'll get a notice that your domain's nameservers are
not pointed correctly and given the names and IPs of the nameservers to point
to)
-
Once you register a new domain (in
any registrar), you immediately set your new nameservers for that domain in the
registrar settings to point to those of ZoneEdit.com.
-
Start managing *everything* to do
with your websites, emails, MX records, subdomains from ZoneEdit.
ZoneEdit.com not only gives you 5 free domain managements
free, but it's also dedicated for this purpose. So it's faster, easier and very
slim to use - the UI is simply functional, not beautiful. And it has good
guidance on what to do when. There are some other sites like it, but I like it
a lot.
Web hosting
I use webHost4Life
as my service provider(click here
for going there without using my referrer ID). The support seems decent and the payment isn't too high.
For my money I get ASP.NET hosting, 2 SQL server 2005 databases and 2GB of
space. The best thing about it is that the control panel allows creating your
own site on it using DotNetNuke or other platforms. We'll talk about that
later.
Once you setup your website there, all you need to do is add
the hosting IP to ZoneEdit.Com and you're good to go. They also allow you to manage your domains and
emails there (just like godaddy.com does, but I manage it all from
ZoneEdit.com.
(note: when you have multiple domains that you want to
host on the same hosting service at webhost4life, you need to pay an extra $15
a year for each domain name that points to the "root" of the site so, it won't
cost you anything to have "X.mydomain.com" and "y.mydomain.com" pointed to a
virtual folder on your site there, but if you want both of them to point to the
root, it will cost you extra)
I want to use Exchange for
my emails
That's what I wanted to. It's pretty easy to do - I opened
an account with LanLogic
for hosted Exchange. The nice thing about it is that it provides access to
mobile clients just as easily as part of the package, so I can read emails on
the go from my mobile phone, and I don't have any sync problems reading email
from anywhere.
Plus, I get to use outlook on my home and laptop, without
needing to host Exchange server or administer it, which is a pin (I tried).
Support is not amazing, but it works. I needed it to
configure certificates for SLL through my mobile phone, and got the info I
needed.
I don't want to use
Exchange, and I don't want to pay for a "real" email.
Actually, that's also possible. The ingredients:
-
A Gmail Account
-
A domain
-
ZoneEdit.Com (optional, but
recommended)
Our basic plan is this:
Manage all our email from Gmail, but "appear" to be sending mail from "mydomain.com".
Here's what you do.
-
If you're using "ZoneEdit" you can
add a new email forwarding so that all mail sent to me@mydomain.com will be automatically
forwarded to "me@gmail.com" . That's simple enough.
-
Now go to your gmail account,
click "settings", then click "accounts",
and next to the "send mail as" section click "edit info". Put your "official"
email in the "reply to " field.
Now, every email you get will be though gmail, and every
reply you send will be from "me@mydomain.com.
I want to have a "catch
all" email address
"Catch all" is a term that basically says "if someone sends
an email to "*@mydomain.com" - forward
it to some email address. That way you can create "virtual email address that
you can filter on. For example, you go
to a site "mySpamSite.com" and need to register. You can give them the email
address myspamsite@mydomain.com
even if that email does not really exist.
If they decide to send you spam in the future, it will be
sent to that email address and you'll know who sent or "shared" your email
address.
It's easy to do with ZoneEdit : just add email forwarding to
"*@mydomain.com" . with GoDaddy.com you can add a new email forward that is
marked as "catch all" (I'm not sure if that's still possible with them, but I
think it is.
Unfortunately, WebHost4life does not allow catch-all
addresses.
I want to build a website
-
Webhost4life
offers a free dotnetnuke installation as part of your account. DotNetNuke (DNN
for short) is an open source portal built with VB.NET which is very powerful
and has lots of community around the world. You can download and install it by
yourself, but having an automated installer is a godsend. This is an advanced
tool that can help you build an enterprise style portal with thousands of
users, a store and much more.
-
Another nice tool to build websites
with is FogCreek's
CityDesk, which has a free version that allows building a website with up
to 5 files in it. After that you have to pay to play. This tool is "desktop"
based, in that you manage the whole site on your desktop, and then "generate"
it and upload it to your hosting FTP. It generates static content, and does not
use a database, and has far fewer options to it (no user management)
There are some other options out there, but
these are the two I think are the most user-friendly.