Domains
Your domain (like hulseycreativeco.com) is the address customers type. You lease it from a registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare) for $10–$20 a year. Own the domain yourself — never let an agency or developer register it on your behalf without you being the account holder.
DNS
DNS is the phone book that maps your domain to the servers that actually serve your site. A misconfigured DNS record is the single most common cause of "my email stopped working" or "my site is down" panic. Keep your DNS at a reliable provider (Cloudflare is our default) and change records carefully.
SSL (HTTPS)
SSL is the padlock in the browser address bar. It encrypts traffic between the visitor and your site. It is required — Google penalizes non-HTTPS sites and modern browsers flag them as "Not Secure." Free, automated SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt (or your host) removed every excuse a decade ago.
Hosting
Hosting is where your website files live. Options range from shared hosting (cheap, slow, dated) to managed platforms (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages — fast, modern, automated) to full infrastructure providers (AWS, GCP — powerful, complex). For a small business, a managed edge platform is almost always the right answer.
CDNs
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a global network of servers that cache your site close to your visitors. A CDN is why a site hosted in Alabama loads instantly in California. Cloudflare, Fastly, and Bunny are the mainstream options.
HTML
HTML is the structure — the words, headings, images, and links. Good HTML is semantic: real heading tags, real lists, real buttons. Bad HTML is a wall of styled DIVs that means nothing to a screen reader, a search engine, or an AI.
CSS
CSS controls the visual presentation — colors, spacing, layout, animation. Modern CSS is powerful: flexbox, grid, container queries, and view transitions replace what used to require heavy JavaScript.
JavaScript
JavaScript adds interactivity — forms that validate, menus that open, filters that update. It is also the easiest way to make a site slow. Good engineering ships as little JavaScript as possible and defers the rest.
APIs
An API is how two pieces of software talk to each other. Your website talks to a payment processor's API to charge a card, to a booking system's API to reserve a slot, to a CRM's API to log a lead. APIs are what make modern websites feel like apps.
Databases
A database is where dynamic content lives — customer records, orders, inventory, form submissions. For most small business sites, the database is invisible: a form submits, the data is stored, the owner sees it in a dashboard or receives an email.
Responsive design
One codebase that looks correct on every device — phone, tablet, laptop, big monitor. Responsive design is the industry default; if a designer or developer offers you a "mobile version" as a separate site in 2026, walk away.
Image formats
- AVIF — smallest, best quality, modern browser support.
- WebP — smaller than JPG, universal support.
- JPG — legacy fallback for photos.
- PNG — for graphics with transparency.
- SVG — for logos and icons that must scale infinitely.
Search engine and AI crawling
Search engines and AI systems both discover your site with crawlers — automated programs that download your pages, parse them, and store them for later. Making your site fast, semantic, and well-linked is what turns a crawler visit into a ranking or a citation.
A robots.txt file controls which crawlers you allow and which URLs they can visit. A sitemap.xml gives them a curated list of every page you want indexed. An llms.txt does the same job specifically for AI systems. Ship all three.