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Creating a Great Web Site on the Cheap

In a perfect virtual world, building your Web site would be cheap and easy. Updating and maintaining it wouldn't take much effort. And, of course, you would make money.

Ah, were it that easy.

Practical and profitable Web sites are hard to come by. If you're not careful, your Web site can become a financial drain. But crafty entrepreneurs sidestep the potential money pit and bootstrap well-oiled sites whose start-up and maintenance costs don't dwarf potential returns. These entrepreneurs devise clever ways to build their sites on the cheap. They take advantage of low-cost marketing strategies to get the word out. And they use free and almost free tools to keep their sites running smoothly.

Here are more tips on how to improve your site without spending a fortune.

Creating a Great Web Site on the Cheap

[pentupentropy]

J, I read some of that. It was helpful. I don't know if you meant to be anymore specific, but some of the things they don't touch on if you only read half of that set of articles is the relativity of your statement.

Anyone reading some ad about how a company will give you a free website and help bring traffic is lying to you. If they had the resources to bring millions of unique people to so many websites they would have far outdone companies who have put literally billions into marketing and attracting business to their online presences.

Even keeping it on the cheap, you can still spend many thousands of dollars on a site. Most web design firms with any real idea what they are doing won't touch a website project that is under $5K. I've dealt with many who wouldn't touch anything under $50K. The term "cheap" online does not mean that $20 is going to make you a millionaire. I think it's happened 4 or 5 times, but that's about it. Depending on your demographic, your ability to deliver and your actual operating methods (amount of fixed and variable CPA and ROI costs), you need to have a site up and running and then you need to lay out some serious ad money.

By serious, I don't mean a million bucks, but a thousand on hand isn't going to get you as much as you think it would. Doubleclick will not entertain advertisers these days for under $5,000.00 either, and they have some pretty sweet methods of targeting and intelligent on-the-fly campaign-honing technology. You need to figure out 3 places to advertise... on a shoestring (and by shoestring I mean about a thousand dollars), you should be able to test at least two separate sets of campaigns. If I feel ambitious today I will actually write an article about this, but for now I'll leave it to you to find more advertising advice around this site.

Back to actual web presences, remember... they are ads. Interactive ads. Let someone with some experience help you. Just because you can use photoshop or paint shop pro and some crap editor (notepad is what you should be using) doesn't mean you're going to make a great website that will attract people much less keep them there.

Think about the possibility of multiple sites: One way to attract people is through a network. You don't even have to have multiple sites, but find people with a site that could benefit whatever resource your provides and make sure it's a symbiotic relationship between the two sites. If you've ever been to a site like hotscripts.com (and if you have a website you for damn sure should have been there), you'll notice it's one of many sites on the inetinetractive.com's network.

iNET Interactive : A social media company operating prominent online communities for technology professionals and technology enthusiasts.

They own 22 sites and have a brand built. This keeps more users within their network. You don't have to own more sites, but it's not a bad idea to partner up with someone who has a site in relation to yours. I have a 3 year old pulling at my leg... bbs =)

[justy540]

I'd have to agree with pentu, a lot of people thing that web design/development should come a lot cheaper than it does, but the saying "you get what you pay for" applys here as it does in most cases. Web developers (good ones at least) are a skilled bunch, and don't come cheap. Any web firm worth it's salt will charge between $100 and $200 per hour, and sites don't take 10 hours. A professional looking custom design may take 20-40 hours, and that's before a line of code is written. That is just setting up the graphics/layout. Development time varies widely depending on what your site is doing and how complex the design is. A social Networking site can take more than 1500 hours of development.

[designed 4U]

I would say the cheapest way building a website is using an open source (free) content management system. For example joomla. Finding the right template (free) is also not time consuming as well as updating/ maintaining.

All of our hosting solutions have Fantastico (With a click of the mouse, you can instantly install a script without any programing knowledge.) pre-installed.