3.01 Web technologies

Lets take a brief look at the basic building blocks that make up your practices presence on the Internet. A domain name and web site.

Domain name
Your online identity is based on your web address, your domain name. This serves the same purposes online as your name, address and telephone number in the real world.
A domain name looks like mypractice.com or mypractice.co.uk – note that it doesn't start with www.
With www in front your domain name becomes a web address - www.mypractice.co.uk .
Add someone@ in front and it becomes an e-mail address - someone@mypractice.co.uk

Com or couk?
At one time a .com domain name ending was considered essential. It didn't matter where your business was actually located. As the number of UK users increased this changed. Now, for businesses located in the UK and serving clients in the UK, a .co.uk domain is the essential, the .com optional.

Nominet
You register your chosen domain name with a central registrar. For .co.uk domains this in Nominet - a not for profit company based on Oxford. Your registration runs for two years at a time and you automatically get the option to renew. If you fail to renew the name stops working and becomes available for someone else to register.

Ownership
Once registered, you have exclusive rights to create a web site or allocate e-mail addresses based on your domain. It is important to ensure that the domain is registered in your practice name – not in the name of your web design or hosting company. When VetsFriend went into receivership they had registered a large number of practice domain names to themselves rather than the practices concerned. These vets found that their web site disappeared and their e-mail addresses stopped working. They couldn't gain control of their domain names as the names “belonged” to the defunct company. These domains are in limbo, waiting until the original registration period ends and they one again become available for registration

Hosting
Your web site needs to live on a computer connected permanently to the Internet. You could do this with a computer in the corner of your surgery – but usually you rent a bit of computer space with a hosting company. Hosting companies continually monitor their computers – properly called servers – and have a variety of backups and redundancies so that problems are minimised and your site is continually online.

Creation
Your web site is simply a collection of computer files. There are dozens of programs, no more difficult to use than a wordprocessor, that you can use to create your web pages. If you have a member of staff with a talent for design you could largely create and maintain your site in-house – though this can become expensively time consuming.

To present a fully professional face to the internet, you will probably want to use the services of a web design company. Lets consider what you need to look out for.

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