How much should I pay for a website?

Try to do a price comparison for website design and you might as well try to catch the wind. The only way to compare prices for your web project is to fill out forms over and over again. Explaining what you want without knowing what you want. You can spend all day trying to decide if the company has enough integrity and if you have enough money.

In your search of web design pricing you will see plenty of do it yourself websites where you can build your own website for just pennies on the dollar, and sometimes for free. So you look and try to decide what the best price is. You can pay as little as $1.99 for a domain name and a free cookie cutter site with a $10 per month hosting charge. But what will it look like when I am done. The reason it is free is that they will be posting ads, which they get paid for, all over the sides of your page. However, you can pay more to have no ads, and even more to design the site differently.

Anyone can learn how to do anything themselves. For example you can learn to do plumbing, roofing, paving, auto mechanics, etc. Then you won't have to hire a plumber, roofer, etc. but, you always have the problems. You may not have the right tools, so you have to spend money on those, and then you may mess up anyway and have to call a professional to fix your mess. Website design is no different.

Sure you can do it yourself. It may take you eight hours to learn how, and you may need to buy Dream Weaver for $200. Then you may find that you have some rank looking photos because you don't know how to adjust them, so you take a few more hours to learn how to do that. Now you need a copy of Adobe Photoshop which will cost you another $699. Okay so you did it yourself. You designed a three page site all by yourself and it only cost you: $200 + 20hours x $10.00fd + $699 that is $1,000.00 and your site still looks like a kid created it.

Do yourself a favor, hire a professional. Websites can cost as much as you want to pay and some of the time you will get what you paid for, but sometimes you will get taken advantage of. So do your homework, know how much stuff costs, realize there will be some mark up and go from there. Don't pay $300 for a domain name that can cost as little as $1.99 from Go Daddy, know who you are dealing with and find someone you can trust, go local if possible, and meet them. Face to face liars are hard to find, cyber liars are everywhere.

There is a great range in Website pricing. It all depends on how big and how complicated your site needs to be and what features you want to offer. A professionally designed website can cost several hundred or several thousand dollars. However you can always start small and grow your site because everyone should own a Web site to advertise their services and products online

Build Your Business with a Better Website

When the web was young you could put up your site and forget it. Today you need to update your site at least every two years just to keep it working efficiently. A website can easily be the best marketing tool for a business. A less than polished site will be passed over, especially if there are plenty of competitors. With a few changes and some user friendly tools your site can get noticed and bring in the sales your business is looking for. In this new digital age the internet is the best way to promote your products and/or services and your advertising dollars are best spent here.

If you have an older website that you would like to update but you're not so sure just what to do, here are some ideas to use or to ask your web designer to implement on your website.

1. Get some good pictures, or update your old ones. People like to "be there" so you NEED to get some good pictures of your business and or your product(s), and maybe a picture of you. Hire a photographer if you need to.

2. Add some Flash. Flash ads are the difference between a mediocre website and a really sharp looking one. More and more people are on high speed connections so flash ads are okay and are in most all updated good looking websites. Do be careful not to have too large of a flash file even with high speed they can bog down and take too long to load. Use this rule 2 seconds 2 long 2 many leave.

3. Add a shopping cart. If you have a product; you need to offer it online for purchase. It is simple with pay pal and shopping cart software and not very expensive either.

4. Get an E-Commerce Site. Do you have a lot of products? Take pictures of them and get set up with an E-Commerce site. You can change your inventory with the click of a mouse, and that's how easy it is for customers to purchase your products.

5. Make it Search Friendly. A Website named heavensanswer.com will not be picked up in the search engines when someone searches for baby clothes. All sites swimming in the internets ocean need SEO (Search Engine Optimization). All it takes is the right words in the right places and you will come to the surface in the search engines.

6. Make it user friendly. Are you still making your customers download and print out a form, and then they have to spend $.42 to send it to you. Update everything regularly. Online forms, online surveys, e-signatures, faster downloads, and by all means update those links. Also check your e-mail and get an automatic response for any one who inquires on your site.

7. Be Found. Advertise your website. There are many new and evolving ways to advertise your website. Adwords, Adsense, Pay Per Click, Directory Listings, and paid Advertisements. Once you tweak up your web presence, then it's time to send your site out to be noticed. However like spam once had its day, you should be careful how you spend and hire a professional if you need to. Keep your site fresh, user friendly and using the correct words to be noticed in the search engines and you will find the internet to be one of the best places to promote your business.

Designing Business' Online, Your Business Website

Within the virtual world of cyberspace lies the ability to connect to and build a relationship with 80% of today's consumers and quite possibly 100% of your potential customers. A Website on today's internet needs structure, market friendly setup and positioning, after all this is your storefront it is how you take your business to the new town square.

Your business needs more than just a website. You need a web presence designed to draw customers to you like a magnet. You need the right words and the right design. The internet has made doing business today quite different, if customers aren't actually purchasing online they are still visiting the product online before buying. Your website has the opportunity to close the deal. You need an online business presence that shows your best but is also user friendly for your customers. You need a dynamic site with clips and tips and video, using not only the right words and the right design, but connecting to all the relevant avenues that will draw in your sales.

The steps to designing your business online.

1. In a website what you say is most important! The words you use must be correct and carefully thought out. Not just for marketing purposes, but for search engine optimization or SEO. The most important words to pick out first are the words in your domain name. Unless your name is already popularized your domain name is best if it describes your business with the top key words for your service or product. With your target audience in mind, using as few words as possible, keeping in mind the key words chosen to best represent your service or product in the search engines you need a marketing statement to compliment your website. Ideally it says what you do, who you serve and how they benefit. 2. Exposure is an important key when you have a website, now that you have the correct words in place it is time to place the words into directories so that consumers or businesses will see your business when they search. Directories also provide the next step for your successful website, Backlink's.

3. Link building is important for several reasons; each backlink is a business card for your website just like in the real world you need to pass out as many business cards as you can. Advertising firms and serious webmasters know that this is the most time consuming part in building a successful website. It will increase your page rank (where your page comes up with relevant searches) in the search engines. A higher page rank is determined by the number of incoming links to that webpage. So if you are targeting to broader searches that leave out city and state the page rank building process is essential. This is also true for high concentrations of competitor sites in specific cities and states, as well as national and international listings.

4. Site Structure and Navigation are another of The Most Important parts of your website. With more and more high speed internet users, flash sites are now very common, Web 2.0 applications such as wikis, blogs, podcasts, and social networking sites are also embedded into many websites. Webmasters must be sure to keep the site relatively flat using as few layers as possible because consumers hate to wait for pages to load. Search Engines must also be considered when building a web page. There should be no need to click more than two or three times to get to the deep content of a web site, the shorter the path to an internal page, the more credit is given by the search engines. Keeping the structure of your URL clean and neat will also help with your ranking in the search engines. The content of your site and how it makes sense to the consumer are important to consider, users want to see what they want with the least amount of clicks.

5. Promoting your site with Web 2.0 applications is now very common and is almost a must for your website traffic to be at its peak. Funneling in consumers from relevant links is the key to more sales for your business. If a person visits a blog about your product and finds information you have provided which links to a page on your website, this is likely to result in a sale for your business. Some of the various applications you can use are Videos, Blogs, E-Zine articles, Press Releases, Wikis, Podcasts, Twitter, Facebook and even MySpace. All of these are generally free ways to promote your website drawing in interested consumers.

6. Analytics are used to track the visitor information of a website. This software can be added to your site for your marketing informational purposes. However your website needs to be set up correctly to run the software. The information you can gather consists of how the visitor came to your website, did they type in your domain, come from the search engine or from a directory or an ad sense ad. You will also be able to see what city, state, and country the visitor came from. Most importantly you will see how many and which pages the visitor looked at and how long they stayed on each page. All of this information can be available for tracking purposes with flow charts for your marketing analysis.

7. Creating and using an authentic stamp on each new media is important, this is where a logo and some specific colors, fonts, pictures etc...comes in. However this is hyped up by advertisers as Branding, and can cost as much as you are willing to pay for it.

8. Adwords, Adsense, and Pay Per Click, while these avenues of promotion should not be ignored many web designers and advertising companies try to escape building a solid, well designed, high page rank site, by putting you on an Ad words campaign. This might bring some quick results but will keep you on the "Throw Cash at it Stage" in website ownership. It's more like renting a website then owning one. Successful websites are built like any other business. If the foundation is not strong you will be feeding the Advertising firms pockets instead of reaching the point independence and a good ROI (return on investment). Regardless of the amount of clicks your campaign gets the customer will eventually end up at your website and if it is not at its best your campaign can fail completely.

When you build a website it becomes a representation of your storefront, a cyber manifestation of your business. Take the necessary steps to portray your image correctly and be certain your website reaches to the consumer from various avenues. This will insure that your website will generate traffic and thus sales while building an online relationship with your customers.