In today's business world, few if any new businesses start without a web presence. In fact, many new businesses are totally web-based. It follows then, that entrepreneurs need at least a basic understanding of what the web/internet is all about, and what is involved in establishing a communication vehicle, i.e., a web page representing your new startup. The purpose of this section of the Wiki is to provide enough background so that when your newly hired web developer talks in Web 2.0 terms, you will at least have an idea of what he/she is talking about. http://www.siteground.com/, a web-based service provider hosting this Wiki, will be used herein as a example of what to expect in establishing your web site.

It is beyond the scope of the Wiki to delve deeply into selection of a Domain Name. Suffice to state the name should communicate what your startup is all about, be catchy, or far out. The Domain Names Viddler (video hosting site), GoDaddy? (domain registration and hosting site), eBay (whatever it is), and Skype (a VOIP company now owned by eBay) are recent examples. Most hosting companies provide a means of checking to see if the Domain Name you have chosen is available. Screen shots of such a panel on Siteground.com along with the results of the search using this Wiki's Domain Name ThinkBeta.com are below.

Most hosting companies such as Siteground will both register your chosen domain name and host the site for a fixed monthly or yearly fee. This is the easiest and most economical method to use; registering you domain name directly with "the government's agent" and separately paying for a hosting site will cost much more and gains you nothing. Assuming your are OK with use of Siteground.com, their Home Page provides a panel to "Sign Up" shown below:

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It takes about two days or so for your new domain name to propagate through the Internet's Domain Name Servers (these servers point your domain name back to the correct web server "serving" your recently chosen Domain Name). In the interim, most sites provide customers with direct access to their web server assets. Additionally, many web hosting companies provide an online web authoring tool to help newbees get a web up and running. Siteground.com provides a tool named "SiteBuilder." This tool was used to construct http://www.yabi.biz/

There are literally literally hundreds of web site builder tools out there, from Microsoft's Front Page, to Macromedia's Dreamweaver. Again, it is beyond the scope of this Wiki to evaluate tools - each to his/her own. But two programs are worthy of mention: You can use most word processing programs to generate web content. Just use the "Save As" feature, and select Web Page, or htm, or html. A second program that is free, is Nvu (N-View) which has its own Wiki here. Nvu is simple, can display WYSIWYG, raw HTML, and preview modes, fast, and did we state FREE?

Site design per se is also outside the scope of this "Get It Up" Wiki. However, one common mistake that most all web mashers make is uploading pictures without reducing their physical dimensions or their physical byte-size. There are lossless photo compression programs generally available that reduce the footprint (size of the photo in bytes) without any noticeable reduction in clarity of the photo. One such program used extensively in preparing photos and screen shots for this Wiki is WebGraphics Optimizer für Windows avaliable from this link. An example of use of this Optimizer with actual photos showing the "before and after" follows. In the example, a reduction by almost a factor of three was obtained. All else being equal, the "after" photo should load on a web page three times faster than the unprocessed version. Remember, in the World Wide Web, faster is also better!

Whatever you end up using, you need to load your work of art up/onto your web server. Many web development tools allow you to "publish" your work directly to your web server space. Some of us are more hands on, and like to push our mashes directly to where we want on our web servers. To do this, you need to use File Transfer Protocol (ftp). This Wiki has been loaded using CoreFTP available for free from here. Core, after being properly setup, when linked to your web server, displays YOUR COMPUTER's assets in the left panel, and YOUR WEB SERVER's assets in the right panel. Transferring files either way is only a matter of clicking, and watching Core do its work. Nifty, easy, not Rocket Science.

A Meta Tag is a Meta element which provides information about a given web page, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly. Meta Tags are inserted into the HTML code in the format illustrated in this Wikipedia link, but are not visible to a user looking at the site. Some web site provides, such as Siteground.com, via their Sitebuilder software, support installation of Meta Tags into a hosted web site. If you don't understand any of the previous link, you are not alone. It's time for you to go to the Entrepreneurial Marketing section of the Wiki and look at the section entitled Search Engine Optimization.

Siteground provides installation of the stuff listed below as a point and click option via the links outline above. This Wiki's engine, TikiWiki was installed using the above. The site http://www.entr200.com/'s Moodle was also installed the same way. Not all/many sites make installation of such programs this easy. Buyer beware! Note the links are actual setups of the linked programs running on either http://www.thinkbeta.com/, or http://www.entr200.com./ Please note also there is a prediction market called Free Market running from http://www.thinkbeta.com/ also.

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