How to manage a website
This is a series of articles on Web admin both for individuals managing their own website and for small businesses that can’t justify in-house IT.
We’re going to start by looking at control panels, what they do, and why — depending upon the services you signed up to — there can be one or several.
A control panel is actually just a website that lets you manage a set of utilities. You can imagine this as being very similar to your domestic services: if you have a gas boiler, you have a meter that displays how much fuel you’re consuming and a thermostat which controls the temperature and timer. These are separate control panels from each other, but also separate from your electricity supply, which has its own meter and fuse box. When you book a heating engineer to look at your boiler, you probably don’t want to give them your front door keys, you’ll try to limit access to the parts of your house that have the boiler and thermostat in. Similarly, there are multiple services we might have connected to our website, and we should grant access to a Web developer equal to the tasks they need to perform.
In the first short series, we’re going to start by looking at what a domain name control panel is, and the kinds of tasks you might need to do with it.
In a second short series, we’ll look at Web hosting, and the several sorts of control panel that you acquire with a hosting plan.