Almost all small business’s who have websites, hired a website design company, to create the site for them. You tell the companies what you want the site to look like, and then they create it for you.
There are two main problems with this however:
1) Price – Web design companies are extremely expensive. They often charge thousands of dollars to create the website for you. For large business’ this is fine. They can afford to pay this much money. Small business’ however are not able to afford this, or at least they would rather not have to pay this much.
You can make this slightly more affordable; by using a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get). This is software which allows you to create a website yourself, without having to have any technology knowledge. It allows you to create a website, by simply pointing, clicking, and typing. The equivalent would probably be like using Microsoft Word to create a document.
WYSIWYG’s aren’t quite as expensive as hiring a web design company, however they are still quite expensive. To buy a descent WYSIWYG, you should expect to pay $300-$400.
2) Additional Requirements – Unfortunately many people falsely assume that hiring a web design company is all that’s required to create a website. This however is not true. There are still many other requirements. The main two are: a) Web Hosting-Business’ who want to create a website, and have already hired the web design company, still need to find someone to host the website for them. When a web design company finishes creating the website, it doesn’t actually go on the internet so others can see it. It just sits their on you’re computer, or theirs. You must find someone who can host the website for you. This allows the website to go on the internet. B) Promotion-After you site is online, people are not instantly going to find it. People won’t just do searches for your keywords and instantly stumble upon your site. In fact the major Search Engines like Yahoo and Google won’t even no that you exist. You must figure out ways to promote your site. The way that Search Engines find out about you is when people link from their site to yours. The Search Engines judge a sites worth primarily by how many links, and the quality of links pointing back to a site.
There are many methods of building links, such as submitting your site to directories, posting in forums, doing link exchanges, buying links (which Google no longer allows), making comments on blogs, etc. There are also other companies which you can hire to do link building. These people however also are very expensive and depending on how much link building you want done, can cost even more than the web design companies.
There are some tools that you can use to make this easier to do. You can purchase certain software, which will show you what keywords to use for your site, and how you should change certain keywords to others. You can also purchase software that submits your site to all the major Search Engines. This also can be expensive, and you will again have to pay thousands of dollars to buy all of the software that you need. (It would still probably be cheaper than hiring someone to do this for you).
