TECH SUPPORT is a biweekly column written by Ken Richman of Teddington Web to help you get your business online and to make a success of it once you are up and running.

Sadly, I'm plenty old enough to remember the days pre-Internet. 

I was working for a marketing agency in the 90's and a colleague had returned from a trip to the States. 

He told us how the billboards and newspaper ads were starting to show web addresses as well as the familiar logos and straplines. We wondered if it would catch on. 

Six months later we were doing the same.

Back then, it was really just about websites, but to be successful now, your online presence is likely to comprise many different parts: online business directory listings, social media, customer reviews, YouTube videos, a website, blog posts, and even comments you've left on other people's posts.

All these parts need to work together. 

They should promote the same values, share a distinctive look wherever possible, not contradict, and ideally lead the viewer to the inevitable conclusion which is to become a customer of yours.

These different elements work for you in different ways: to serve as a source of information about your product, to build trust by positioning you as an expert in your field, to remind people of your brand values, to make an announcement of something new, to make your product or service desirable, to allow customers to contact you, and so on.

You can see that this can quickly turn into a lot of work to manage.

Work this most certainly is. 

However, it's important that you remain in control of your online presence, even when that's not always entirely possible. 

Think of customer reviews for instance, or the awful spats you'll find on X (which we'll always call Twitter).

But one thing hasn't changed since the 90's: your website is the heart of your online presence. 

Unlike other online media, you have complete control over it, so it can totally reflect your brand – your colours, your fonts, your style. 

It is not surrounded by competing brands just one click away, jostling for the visitor's attention, like in a directory listing. 

A website can provide information with no limits on content length or style. 

It can take orders and collect payments for you, play videos, display your testimonials. 

It can forward messages to you, directly from your customers. 

It is yours to do what you want with.

Before you have a website, you need a web address (domain). 

It's how people find you – or, to be a bit more exact, where they find the computer that hosts your website. 

Some examples of domains are google.com, or teddington.nub.news.

The domain name works like an address, but the actual address on the web is defined by a sequence of numbers called an IP address. 

Each device connected to the Internet (including your own computer and your smartphone) is assigned an IP address. 

A typical IP address looks like this:

127.149.34.1

As you can see, an IP address like this is quite difficult to remember. Domains were invented partly to solve this problem. 

Helpfully dotted all around the web are computers whose job is to convert between the domain and the IP address to route the Internet traffic to the right place. 

This saves you the task of remembering and entering a long string of numbers instead of an easy-to-remember domain – for example (ahem), teddingtonweb.com.

The domain is more than just the address of the website. 

You're probably going to want to use it for your business emails. Once you have registered your domain, you can have any email address of your choice that ends with your domain (following the '@' symbol).

For example: if you registered myfantasticbusiness.uk and your name is Ken then you have the right to send and receive emails from [email protected]

Customers are more likely to trust an email from your own business domain than from, say a hotmail or yahoo address, such as [email protected], because only you can set up emails on your own domain.

Next time, we'll look at what goes into choosing that all-important domain, and why you need to be quick about it – without leaping in headfirst!