Go Cheap!

How to save on your web site

Four aspects of a web site.

1. Domain Name

Lots of places advertising low prices on domain names at $20-$35 each. Domain name is just listing your domain in a service, and you can find many companies that will do that for under $10.

Even though it's cheap, take time to choose a name you will use permanently, and keep it up to date. Remember, it's your Internet identity. Often other people will wait until your domain name expires, register it themselves and then try to charge an elevated price to sell it back to you.

2. Space

The domain doesn't give you anyplace to put it, though. You need to have a place for the user to go. The domain is just the directions. Many ISPs will give their clients a limited amount of space for their web pages, though most don't allow you to use a domain name, among other things. If that's adequate for you, go for it. Because there's not much you can do with that kind of site, it's easy to manage.

Most companies use a "hosting" company, and rent space on a monthly basis, often paid annually. The hosting company provides space, an allowable amount of bandwidth, how much your site can be accessed, and a host of other services to manage your site.

For a small company, adequate hosting is available for under $10 per month. As in most any product or service, you normally don't want to go with the most popular, most advertised or cheapest. Other than that, you have do search and query about the best hosting companies at the time. Most of them will post stats about uptime, usually above 99%, and while that is important, server load is also important. Overloaded servers lead to sluggish response and even timeouts for users.

Do make sure your domain name is not dependant on you stay with a particular company. You should be able to change hosts and use your same domain name.

That's not to say your hosting provider is a minor thing. In addition to providing space and bandwidth, your hosting provider will usually provide a mail server, so you can get all your mail addressed to your domain, a list of tools to maintain and monitor your web site, and an collection of web applications you could use to build or add to your web site. Much more could be said about that in a separate article dedicated to hosting providers.

3. Design

We're talking cheap here, so for design you can use a variety of cheap software packages for web design. In fact, you can use Microsoft Office products to create and upload a page.

You could also use web design templates for consistent look. Microsoft Word 2000 has a few templates and others can be downloaded from their website by Microsoft users.

With a little time, you could also get a book on HTML and create your own web page with a text editor, like Microsoft's Notepad.

Graphics are available for download at various sites on the Internet, though they are often hard to find. If you are artistically inclined, you could also download and use Gimp, a few graphics program also available on the Internet.

Other design options.

a. Some sites provide an easy to use interface to update and maintain your web pages. There's a wealth of content management software available, either independently or through your hosting provider.

b. Cheap designers. There is an endless supply of new graphic designers trying to break into the web design market. This is a trial and error system, so make sure the one that's doing the design for you shows you some functional sites before working on yours. Oftentimes, a site designed by an amateur may not be manageable in the future, in which case you may have to start over later.

One of the best things about doing your own web page is you'll have a better idea of what your want when you really need to dish out money for a more professional site.