inside
costco
Going
online
Building a Web site
is as easy as 1-2-3
By Steve Fisher
THERE ARE MANY reasons to have a
Web site, including:
■ To network
■ To offer goods or services to potential
customers all over the world
■ To virtually run a business 24 hours
a day, even while you sleep
But the main reason can be summed up
in one word: numbers. You could be reaching
hundreds or thousands of potential customers daily.
So the question is not if but how to create
a Web site and get it on the Internet. For a
large company, this means bringing in a contractor to survey stakeholders, hire design and
content experts, build, test and eventually “go
live,” possibly not for months. For small or
medium-size businesses, it can be as easy as
finding a solid hosting company with the tools
to simply create a site and the expertise, experience and reliability to keep the site online.
Costco offers Value Web™ from Hostway,
a leading provider of Web hosting solutions
for small to medium-size businesses worldwide. With Value Web, you can be online in a
matter of hours. It takes only three steps.
1. Name that domain. Once your
payment information is verified, you will
receive e-mail with instructions on accessing
your account, and then it’s time to nam e
your domain. A domain name is a Web
address—the place where people can find
your site. A good domain name should be
easily recognizable, easy to remember and
as short as possible. A great example is
www.costco.com. If you’re seeking items or
services from Costco, the domain name
makes perfect sense.
Once you have chosen a name you want
to use, it’s not necessarily a slam dunk. The
name may be taken. Value Web provides a
tool that allows you to see if a name is avail -
able and, if so, lets you take it with the click o f
80 The Costco Connection MAY 2008
VEER
photo gallery, B-W Gallery (www. b-wgallery.
com), is a perfect example of what can be
accomplished with CreateIt! So is the Web site
for Twins Silver Dream (
www.twinssilver
2. Build your site. If you have coding
dream.com), owned by Costco members Patti
skills or stand-alone software that builds Web Sapp and Susan Levin of Ellicott City,
sites, you can construct your own site and Maryland. With no prior Web design experi-
upload it. But, as Costco member A.J. (Jim) ence, the sisters built their own site. Says Levin,
Vincolisi, of Atascadero, California, points “It’s very user-friendly, so we did it all our-
out, “A good program is six, seven hundred selves. The basic site took a couple of days.”
dollars.” And, of course, you have to figure out how to use it, and that could take time.
3. Post with your host. Once your Value Web’s CreateIt! Online tool gives even site is ready, as Levin explains, “You basically non-techies an easy way to achieve profes- hit a button and you’re online.” That’s where sional-looking results. 3having an established, experienced hosting
CreateIt! Online eliminates the need for company like Hostway comes in. A Web host
technical know-how and offers thousands of will house, serve and maintain your site and
design possibilities, with 70 layouts and mul- ensure that it is consistently available on the
tiple color and graphic options, letting you Internet. Hostway has more than 600,000
build a professional-looking Web site. You can customers worldwide, offers 24/7 North
even add Flash animated intros to your site. America–based support via e-mail and phone,
Vincolisi emphasizes, “There’s no learn- and guarantees 99.99 percent uptime.
ing curve. You just go in there and do it. You For more information, go to costco.com
can have your Web site online with just an and search “Web hosting” or call toll-free
hour or so of work.” The Web site for Vincolisi’s 1-800-346-1543. C
a button. If the name is unavailable, a similar
name with a different extension may be
obtainable—e.g., .net instead of .com.
From the CreateIt! Online template
(left), Costco member A.J. Vincolisi
created his b-wgallery.com Web
site (right).
