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Cheap website

Entry level web-sites

Cheap website?..........You want maximum value for your money. You also know that usually "You get what you pay for" so how do you reconcile the two, or simply, what's with this Cheap & Cheerful website business?

 

What do you want a web-site for? Serious question because your reason for wanting a site and the way you start off will have a huge influence on future progress. Do you just want a 'presence' on the world wide web (hence - www). Do you want it for communicating with people with a common interest - a pop star fan club perhaps. In either case, a cheap website might be all you need. On the other hand, if you want to sell goods off a stand-alone website or promote your existing business or services, or reach out to a wider audience then a cheap website could be your most expensive option.....................

 

Nobody knows how many websites there are on the internet. It is thought that there are more than 100,000,000+ with many thousands being added every day. For a few pounds you can be a part of that huge family, but only a very small part so what then? OK., so far this section has been all questions. Let's cut to the chase and come back to the questions later.

 

To be on the internet you need an exclusive name - your URL or universal resource locator. <www.income-in-laterlife.com> is the URL for this site. It is your unique address and you have to register it and pay a small annual fee to keep it active. .com is the most common indicator for a business web-site but you may see a number of others like .org or .gov, which usually indicate the nature of the site. You will then need someone who will host your URL and the software programme required to build your site.

 

This needn't be expensive because there are hundreds if not thousands of hosting companies - just Google using 'hosting' or something similar - and you will find many offering a low cost service where they will obtain your URL and host your web-site for quite a small annual fee. They may even offer a free programme which will allow you to construct a cheap website without you having to learn any programming knowledge. Think in terms of around £50.00 for the first year as a sensible minimum. Not a great deal of money and not a particularly sophisticated site, hence the Cheap & Cheerful tag.

 

Sounds good? Well, like I said earlier, there are a few snags which could make this your most expensive option! Remember those 100,000,000+ other sites out there? They got first crack at the choice of all the good names so you are unlikely to get the one you fancy. Not the end of the world, but you may have to settle for a URL with several words, all separated by hyphens (the internet doesn't allow gaps in the title so you either have something like

<www.Iwanttobesomewhereelsetomorrow.com> or <www.I-want-to-be-somewhere-else-tomorrow.com>

The later is less likely to cause confusion - imagine spelling the first version over a poor 'phone line to someone - but other than the people you can personally contact about your new website, who is going to find you amongst those 100,000,000+ other sites? What will happen is that you will launch your new cheap website and work at it, adding material, exchanging links with other web-masters, doing all the site search engine optimising exercises and probably paying out for additional programmes. Every day you will check your visitor numbers, look for profits and eventually decide the whole thing is a complete waste of time. What will it have cost? Not very much in cash terms but a whole year or more of valuable time when you could have been producing income. That's expensive time, so Cheap? Yes. Cheerful? probably only on the day you first launched your site!

 

So, if you only require a cheap website for a small group of people you already know, then Cheap & Cheerful may be acceptable. There is one example HERE of such a site. However; if you want to make money from a web-site, particularly if you are interested in long term income, then you need to look at our next section Earning Money from your Web-site

 

To sum up. Decide first what you want a web-site for. If it is intended to be a profit making enterprise then don't fall into the trap of buying cheap and then having to buy lots of extras to make it work - you will only end up with a mish mash of systems which may eventually become profitable, but only after you have thrown too much time and money at it. Take a look at the SBI Concept first - a complete system with evertything you need to build a business. It will almost certainly prove cheaper in the long run!

 

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