The package includes 5 basic pages, 1 StarMail account and hosting for everything for one year.  It also includes registration of a sub-domain of, Firestar Design, for example yoursite.firestardesign.co.uk.  If you would like us to register your own top-level domain (eg. yoursite.co.uk) this can be added to your package (with a .co.uk domain starting at £10.00 per year)., but don't worry if your domain name seems to long - we'll also provide a free memorable qwick-link, for example qwick.co.uk/firestar to ensure your site can be accessed with a memorable name.  If you have existing artwork available in digital format from, for example, company letterheads we can easily incorporate these into our templates to ensure that your online presence is consistent with your existing one.

All our sites are hosted on professional grade servers which are guaranteed to be online 99.9% of the time and are regularly backed up.  We will also make additional backups before major changes to your site to ensure any data is easily recovered in the unlikely event that anything goes wrong.

Website marketing is a hugely powerfull tool and we can run you through the pros and cons of each method of advertising.  Costs are hugely dependant on what you want to achieve with your site and we can guide you through the whole process.

So what is the best domain suffix to use?

As with almost everything, the answer to this depends on the situation; the first port of call is to check whether your company name has already been registered and, if so, which suffixes are already taken and how much impact these existing registrations will have on your business.  If most options are already taken you should think carefully about registering the left-overs.  Take Twitter as an example, they set up their site and registered twitter.com, as it was available and probably left it at that (in fact twitter.co.uk had been registered before the idea of Twitter had even been conceived).  Due to the success of Twitter the .co.uk site now receives around 3,000 hits a day, for no other reason that they have a similar domain name.  If there are already people using a similar domain to the one you want to register and you go ahead and register, build and market the site there is a risk that your efforts will drive traffic to the alternate site as well as your own.  If you are in direct competition with the other site, this could prove disastrous.  If you were setting up a candle shop and found candles.com and candles.co.uk had both been taken but candles.biz was available, would you take it?  Probably best not to as people may remember the candles aspect but opt for the more common .co.uk or .com suffix – again you are driving trade to your competitors.

Here at Firestar Design, we use www.firestardesign.co.uk; we’re fully aware of www.firestardesign.com and that it belongs to a company operating in the US in a similar market to us.  To be fair, they got there first and have probably been around longer than us, but are unlikely to be a major threat to our business as they operate in a market several thousand miles away.  At the same time, there is little risk of us being accused of cyber-squatting (the rather annoying act of registering a domain just because you’ll get some extra traffic on your site through confusion with a similar domain) and benefiting from their domain traffic so everyone is happy.

So, back to the original question: what is the best domain suffix to use? The simple answer is all of them, within reason.  Many providers now offer packages to register all available suffixes to an available domain, for the sole reason of preventing future cyber-squatters from profiting from your future success.  These can be pretty cheap and act as an insurance policy against issues in the future (for as long as the current domain structure is in existence at least.)  As new domain suffixes become available, then you must also decide whether to register them to maintain your monopoly on the domain; again, this depends on a number of factors, including the number of visitors you have and the attractiveness of your domain name.  If you had all the available suffixes on www.gold then you would be far more keen to maintain your monopoly than if you had www.johnsmithautorepairs. and all the related suffixes.

In short the registration of a domain name is a pretty simple and low-cost activity; the registration of the right domain name can be more complex and requires a lot more thought – if you are set on a particular domain and it is already registered, it can also be a lot more costly so it is worth getting in quick, before your company hits the headlines and some bright spark goes off and registers it for you, ready to sell to you later at a profit!

One final point… did we register www.firestardesign.co when we had the chance?  It’s a bit of a rip-off at several times the price of other suffixes but we’d still rather we had it than anyone else.

For advice on domain registration or any other issues associated with building or developing your online capabilities, get in touch with us using the contact form on this site or by giving us a call.  We can register most domain names for a mere £10.00 (apart from .co, which are a little more expensive!)

Now, jump forward a few years and some major advances in the online world, and most people will have a short list of businesses they are ready to trade with before they have even considered picking up the phone.  The level of importance people put on internet research will vary from person to person but it is fair to say in the modern world most people will have a look at what Google rather than the Yellow Pages suggests and there are many who will complete the transaction without ever talking to the person or company they are trading with.

We all know this is happening, but what are the impacts to the business who is offering services to the modern consumer?  There are three areas which need to be considered: completeness, timeliness and visibility.

We’ll continue with our Yellow Pages example; for completeness, the level of detail expected in the good old days was already touched on above, a name, an address and a telephone number was sufficient.  If you wanted to push the boundaries, you could pay for a bold entry, a logo or even a small advert, all of which were a good way to draw people eye to your business.

Completeness in the internet age is something different; if you want the casual surfer to know that you offer a service, you have to tell them.  If you don’t and someone else does they will drop you from their short list – the modern world is this unforgiving.  A website with a name, address and a phone number will only be used as such; a client who already knows you exist and wants to contact you may use your site as a reference point to look up your phone number but to a prospective customer, you’re already up against it.  As a minimum you need visual clues, some photos of your products or, even better, people enjoying your product and a description of what you do and why you do it better than everyone else.  If you have a clear range of products, these should be identified and if possible, ordered through the website.  The user should only need to speak to you if the nature of the service requires it, not because they can’t find the information on your site.  It’s not because they are unfriendly, but time is precious and if they find a site that gives them all the information they need, they may already have a winner in their head; the other site may offer a significantly inferior product but if you haven’t told them that in clear English they will assume otherwise.

Timeliness depends more on your business; if you are an electrician and offer the same services throughout the year, on call 24/7 then there’s no need to tell people you are going to be at work on Monday, but if you are a retailer or restaurant people want to know what you are selling now!  If your information is 100% complete but the menu changed last year and the prices have gone up three times since, you may attract them to your venue but the first impressions will be “I thought you had my favourite, but I can’t see it on the menu” and “This looked pretty reasonable on the site but it’s actually a bit expensive”.  You’ll then be fighting your way to recover throughout their visit.

Finally, visibility; you can have the best website in the world with real-time information but if your clients can’t find it then you have a problem.  Think about a hotel just next to London Bridge, with panoramic views, an amazing restaurant, swimming pool and everything else you’d expect from a 5* establishment; now suppose there was a mix-up and they put their full page advert in the Arizona edition of the Yellow Pages.  Anyone, searching near London Bridge on Lake Havasu⁽¹⁾ would find that the hotel was no where to be found whereas anyone in London, England would know nothing about its existence (assuming the Yellow Pages really were the only place to find out such hotels…)

A good website should appear on all the major search engines and anywhere else that people look for your particular goods or services – if you’re a pub you need to have your website referenced on all the local review sites whilst if you’re selling goods you need to appear in the price comparison sites.  Achieving this is an ongoing task (especially with timeliness in mind) and it can’t be achieved overnight, but over time with a good business, backed up by a good website, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be appearing on the first page of Google when people start their search.

So what does this mean for you?  Basically, when the Yellow Pages was King all you needed to do was check that the contact details were correct and wait until the next year to go through the process again; now things are more complicated.  Not only do you need to put time and effort into developing your site, but you also need to keep an eye on how it’s doing and develop it as your business develops.  That’s where we can help…

Each industry has a different market and different strategies but completeness, timeliness and visibility are always crucial.  We can help develop your site, give you guidance on what should and shouldn’t be included and help you optimise your site to ensure it is visible.  We’ll give you regular feedback on how your site is doing and how we can make it better.  With our help, we can make it almost as simple as submitting your details to the Yellow Pages, whilst building a much better relationship with you existing and prospective clients.