The business

My web problems seem to have settled down.

Emails should all now work as well.

I had a phone chat with Peter today. He needs to review the business plan - make it more succinct. I need to review the financial model and make sure it's correct. I also need to read some articles about doing business in our target country. So that's the homework for this week.

We now have a fully functioning web site. Albeit of one page with very little text. But it's a business presence.

I've been suffering from a bit of impatience. First the web redirection didn't work. (When a browser types in your company's domain name, e.g. www.newbusiness.com, it redirects to where your web pages are really hosted, e.g. www.anisp.com/username/newbusiness/ or whatever. But the brower only sees www.newbusiness.com).

When the domain name register company says you need to wait for 24 hours they weren't being cautious - you really do have to wait this time.

Then email redirection didn't work. (When you send an email to the company's address, e.g. enquiries@newbusiness.com the email is sent to my own email address, e.g. john@john'sisp.com).

So I put in another helpdesk call. They replied today saying "does it work now?" and indeed it did work now. I don't know what had gone wrong yesterday.

Looking throught their web site again I noticed something I hadn't spotted before. Telephone calls to their support line costs 50p per minute. Ouch. So I kept to emails. And although they say responses could take up to 24 hours in reality it was only a few hours.

No big deal. It's not like we needed the web presence today. And once the redirections are set up, which they are, everything remains pretty static - so problems are unlikely.

Last couple of days I've been looking for domain name register services.

I eventually decided on the first one I looked at. Today I bought their services on-line and registered a .com domain name.

It cost in total about £20.

Knowing a bit about HTML I also knocked up a web page which will do for a parking page and indeed for the company's home page. At the moment it's very basic and only in English. There's very little text but I'm hoping to get that translated into our main business area's language.

The colours (for text and background) corresponds to the design created by our advertising/marketing/design agency for our business cards. The agency chose internet safe colours as default.

Looking at the draft web site the colours work very well indeed. They're not colours I'd have thought to use but then I'm not a graphic designer.

I posted the page onto my own website and redirected the domain name to that site. Users will only see the company's domain name, not my own ISP's domain name.

Rather annoyingly I can't yet browse to the corporate website. I think the DNS tables need to be updated which can take at least 24 hours. Damn, I'll have to wait.