You’ll need an email address for Your Simple Website to put on business cards and other advertising material, so that customers can easily contact you to make enquiries and place orders.  (You don’t need to show your email address on Your Simple Website itself, unless you want to.  Your Simple Website has a contact form that will email enquirer’s messages to you without them seeing your email address – as the email address won’t be visible on Your Simple Website, your personal email address is fine for this purpose.)

 

Your Simple Website doesn’t include an email address, so you will need to get one for your advertising material.  You can use a personal email address, but it’s best if you have an email address that’s exclusively for use with your enterprise.  

 

The best email address for inspiring confidence in your enterprise is one with your own domain name in it, such as: enquiries@yourenterprisename.com.  (The part of an email address after the ‘@’ – ‘yourenterprisename’ in this example – is the domain name). An email address like this looks most professional and is what people expect a successful larger enterprise to have. 

 

To have an email address like this you will need to get your own domain name, which will cost you some money, but not a great deal.  But, if you are a small operation, you don’t really need an email address with this ideal format, and there are other options. 

 

If you get your own domain name it will also form part of your web address, for added professional appearance.

 

Getting an email address for your enterprise

There are a few other ways to get an email address to use with Your Simple Website.

 

Your own ISP

Your own internet service provider (ISP) probably already provides you with your personal email address; they may be able to provide you with an extra one, just to use with your enterprise.  If so, your email address will be in the form: yourenterprisename@yourISP.com, with maybe a country code such as .au, nz, or .uk after it.  This will look pretty good to your customers, as it has your enterprise name in it, and the domain name of your ISP, which indicates that you have some business relationship with a large company, which is always good for inspiring confidence.

 

A free email address

There are many free email hosting services on the World Wide Web, some of the better-know ones are Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo!.  For these services your email address will be in the form: enterprisename@gmail.com, enterprisename@outlook.com, and enterprisename@yahoo.com, respectively.  (You may not feel that an email address that ends in ‘yahoo’ is appropriate for your enterprise!)  

 

There are a couple of issues with free email addresses.  You may not be able to get exactly the name that you want – it’s always surprising what is already taken up by someone else.  The usual solution to this is to add a random number to the name that you want, to make it different to what has already been used, so you may end up with something like: yourenterprisename99@gmail.com, which is okay, but is starting to look a little bit clumsy.  

 

Another issue with free email addresses is that everyone knows that they are free and easy to get, and it could be construed that your enterprise is not professional because you are using a free email address.  This won’t really be an issue for very small enterprises such as a sole trader (where the enterprise is just one person providing a service), but it may be a problem  for a larger enterprise with a few employees and a wider range of products.  

 

Setting up a free email address is quite easy; but, if you’re not confident Your Simple Website can set one up for you, as an extra.

 

A Jimdo Pro email address

If you really do want an email address in the ideal format, with your own domain name to use with Your Simple Website, because your enterprise is a little bigger or you just want that extra touch of professionalism, the best way to get one is to upgrade Your Simple Website from a Jimdo Free hosting package to a Jimdo Pro hosting package.  Jimdo Pro includes a domain name and an email account with up to three different email addresses, all of which will include your domain name.