Manchester Business Resources

What do I need

In order to get your business or organisation online there are some basic requirements as follows:

First you need a Domain Name . One of our domains is manchesterbusiness.com, but we also have manchesterbusiness.co.uk, manchesterbusiness.net and .eu. We can register your domain name for you in either .co.uk or .com format. The .co.uk is usually preferable for most UK based businesses are there is an increasing trend for people to limit their Internet searches to UK sites only.

We have been a Nominet Registrar since 1997 and deal directly with them on your behalf. We adhere to their code of practice and before you ask us to register a domain name please ensure you are aware of the Nominet terms and conditions here: http://www.nominet.org.uk/nominet-terms

The composition of the name is important, ideally it will be short and memorable and also include some indication of your business type. The domain name is the peg that everything hangs off , so your web site address would be www.yourdomainname.co.uk  and your email address would be name@yourdomainname.co.uk.

The good thing is that once you have a domain name , it doesn't matter wher you get your internet access from , your domain name and email address remains the same. The typical cost of a domain name registration is £10 per annum. For a full list of our costs associated with domain name registration, renewal and maintenance please see this page.

Once you have had a web site designed ( see below ) you will need somewhere for it to live. This would mean a computer known as a server which is connected to the Internet  by a robust and sizeable connection , capable of handling lots of demands 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This is known as Hosting and 98% of British companies on the web rely on other people to host their web sites. The alternative is to host the site yourself, which unless you have a dedicated IT department in your large corporate company or you are very technically literate is not recommended.

Hosting also provides email services , web site statistics and a number of other benefits such as FTP. For basic web sites , we currently charge £10 a month for both hosting the web site and providing email services.

The third requirement in your first web site project is the Web Design itself. There are basically two sorts of web sites, first there are static web sites, a fixed number of pages designed in HTML (a web site design language ) and then there are dynamic web sites , often referred to as database driven sites. This second group of web sites are the ones that can sell things, organise things, allow others to contribute. You can learn more about them here.

This is where the variations start.  There are a number of considerations to take into account. A static site can be roughly costed by the page, with some adjustments to the overall cost depending on how the content is provided and how many revisions to the job there are. typically a site of this nature would be £75 a page.

A dynamic database driven site varies a great deal more because there is a great deal of extra work involved , typically installing and configuring a database on the server, building the site itself, building an administration interface for the client to be able to add his own content, pictures and prices etc. There is usually an larger amount of initial consultation and post installation training required. For these reasons a database driven site is going to start at around £1500 to £2000 and may be considerably more.

The good news is that we can provide all your requirements :

Domain Names - we are a Nominet Registrar, the UK agency for all uk domains and Bulk Register, an  equivalent organisation for all .com's etc. We can help you find a name, advise you on your choices and register any name in some cases as quickly as within 2 hours.

Before we can register  any uk domain , you need to understand that you are entering into a contract with Nominet. We would ask that you read the Nominet Terms here : http://www.nominet.org.uk/nominet-terms and confirm to us that you understand these conditions before we regsiter your domain name for you.

For details of all our policies and charges on UK domain names - please go to this page

Web Design - we are skilled at helping busineses turn their ideas into sites. we aim to produce sites that are effective, professional, fast loading and search engine friendly. See some of our designs here.

Hosting - we maintain 2 servers in seperate locations , in Manchester and Nottingham, located in purpose built facilities with state of the art security and fail safe devices. our technical team maintaining our servers and equipment are at the top of their profession and strive to keep our up time at over 99.88%. We can get your web site  live within hours if necessary.