Hosting & Maintenance
While we’re perfectly happy to work with any hosting provider you choose, we often find that new clients have no idea where to host their website. So, in the interests of simplifying project management and reducing your costs, we offer hosting services directly to you under the trade mark Channel Islands Hosting™
Regardless of your hosting platform,
a completed business website must have several features
to be successful.
a Maintenance Plan
Most web developers will put this item last. We mention it first because this is actually where most websites fail in the long run. You can have the best website ever, but if you fail to make updates to both the content and the back end technology, your website will fail you sooner than later. Whether you have an employee you want to charge with this task, you want to learn how to do it yourself, or simply subscribe to our maintenance service (usually between $100 – 200 / month), we can help you create the best plan for the long term success of your website.
a Domain / URLs
Good URLs help search engines and customers understand what is on each page just by looking at the URL.
Keywords matter here and your target queries should be in URLs. Just don’t go nuts – extending URLs just to include more keywords is bad.
Be consistent – while there are multiple ways to create an SEO-optimized URL structure, it’s important to use the same logic across the site.
Use static URLs wherever possible. While dynamic parameters are common, they are not SEO friendly and should be minimized.
SEO Optimized Content
Truly optimized content is developed for both the customer and the computers. Copy needs to contain key words and phrases using the syntax that is most natural for the customer to use when searching. In addition, things like images and video need to be at an ideally balanced resolution for both high-quality display and fast page load times.
a Security Certificate (SSL)
While it’s true there once was a time where conventional wisdom said that an SSL certificate was only for websites capturing highly sensitive data such as credit card numbers and social security numbers, that is no longer the case. Nowadays, search engines and web browsers expect you to have one, and not having one will hurt your SEO. This is because it’s not just the “high value” data that gets stolen, little things like email addresses can be used for an assortment of nefarious purposes and need to be protected.
an XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is submitted to search engines and contains all of the URLs that you want to rank via SEO. The HTML site map is for people to navigate around the site.
