Designing Your Web Site On A Shoestring Budget
By Nick at 15 January, 2007, 10:17 pm
Web designers are professionals who charge for their work. With that in mind, many professionals will not accept a project that offers peanuts for compensation. However, small businesses operate on a small budget. If your small business is in need of a website, and you cannot afford the services of a professional, here are some things that you can do.
- Purchase Microsoft FrontPage. Go to Amazon.com and purchase a copy of FrontPage. Don’t get cute! Just use a basic FrontPage Template to start. Once you have some experience under your belt, you can move up to Dreamweaver. Cost: $90.
- Register a domain name with GoDaddy.com. Cost: $6.95 per year.
- Sign up with HostGator for web hosting. These guys are headquartered in Boca Raton, with their data center located in Texas. Very affordable and reliable. My recommendation is the Baby Plan. Their hosting plans come with the award winning cPanel which includes the popular blog software, WordPress. Cost: $9.95 per month.
- Sign up for a Google account. Cost: Free!
- Within your Google account, create a listing in the Local Business Center. Google with send a postcard with a pin to verify your address. Cost: Free!
- Within your Google account, create a listing in Google Base, an online classified. Cost: Free!
- You can also link up your Google Base listing with an AdWords campaign. This is what I am doing for one of my three campaigns.
- Within your Google account, create an AdWords account. Set a budget of $50 and allow Google to optimize your budget for your campaigns so that you don’t spend more than your budget.
This example that I just provided you can allow you to build a website for $156.90. By doing it yourself without a professional, you can get your website up and running for less than $200.
If you are a small business on a small budget, try these steps in building your website yourself.
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Hi Nick, I was intrigued by the title of your article so I stopped by. You have included some great tips…but…
I’m sure that lots of folks would love to have a well performing website for $150. But it isn’t going to happen. First of all, FrontPage by itself costs around $180, the price you quote is for an upgrade, and if these people have never used a web design program before, they have nothing to upgrade from.
There is a good tip, though, if you have a full time student in your house - you can purchase the academic version of any Microsoft product and save lots of money. The academic version of FrontPage is available here for less than $80.
Next, I’d probably just go for the basic hosting plan at GoDaddy which is only $3.99 per month in 2 month increments. It includes 5 GB space and 250GB of transfer and plenty of emails and DBs… So for just barely over the monthly price at HostGator, they get price the time. Plus, in hosting with GoDaddy and doing domain registration with GoDaddy, it couldn’t be simpler to get started.
Now my final thoughts on why not to do it yourself. If your business ‘needs’ to be on the web and you don’t care if any ever finds you, then by all means do it yourself. But if you expect your website to produce any kind of financial results in terms of increased business or customer flow, people are going to have to be able to find you using major search engines. That means that you need to be on the first page for SERP results. Not an easy place to get. I would recommend that small business owners do some research on search engine optimization and search engine marketing before they do ANYTHING. Buying the wrong domain name can put you at a disadvantage from the very start.
My advice, I’m afraid, is this is a time to hire a professional. I’m by no means the only professional available for this type of work. You can Google the term “SEO consulting results” and get pages and pages of companies to talk to (I would be listed second out of over 1 million)… Do you homework before you start. Consider what you want your website to do for you. Figure out a budget and hire a professional if you expect your website to perform. If you would like to see some of the results that we have achieved check out our SEO consulting results page and take a look at our site at http://www.cecsearch.com.