Building
a Website on a Budget
SolveYourProblem.com Article Series: Web Site Design
Once upon a time, building a website was very
expensive. Now, though, you can have a site up and running
for the price of a used book, if you're frugal and careful.
Getting the cheapest website you can is a great first step
on the ladder, to get started on the web and see if it's for
you.
Five-Dollar Domains
If you're willing to take the less popular domains like .info,
or some of the ones for specific countries, then you should
easily be able to get your hands on a domain for less than
$5. Some countries, such as .tk (the small island of Tokelau),
even offer their domains for nothing!
Free Software
Nowadays, it's easily possible to build a website using nothing
but software you can get for free most of the best scripting
languages are free, and each one has had a lot of free software
built for it by hobbyists. Check out sourceforge.net, which
is a big repository of free software.
You might think that free software would be less functional
than paid-for software, but you'd be wrong. Plenty of free
software is simply implementations of standard software, and
it works perfectly well if you want a forum, for example,
there's no clear advantage in paying massive license fees to
vBulletin (the biggest seller of forum software) instead of
just installing the free phpBB. The free software gives you
more flexibility, and yet comes at no cost.
Free software has become an ideological movement, for people
who want to be able to modify their own software, and much
of the free software out there is quickly becoming widely-used
and standard. Using free software doesn't make you look cheap,
because users are used to seeing it everywhere even better,
the chances are that they already know how to use it.
Templates
Depending on what kind of website you're running, you could
use the design templates that come with your free software
they're usually perfectly adequate. If you don't want to
do that, then a quick look around at a site like templatemonster.com is sure to turn up something suitable for your website that
only costs a few dollars.
Pay as You Go Hosting
Instead of asking you to pay monthly for hosting, more and
more hosts are starting to offer 'pay as you go' hosting, which
means that you only pay for what you use. This saves you a
lot of money, because websites that are starting out rarely
use all the features and bandwidth they're paying their host
to provide.
At nearlyfreespeech.net, for example, you add money to an
account and then pay one dollar for each gigabyte of bandwidth
you use. Most of these hosts allow you to start an account
with very little money the minimum is usually $5. If you
keep your site light on graphics, that first $5 can last you
a very long time.
Guerrilla Marketing
Finally, one of the biggest costs associated with any website
is marketing it whether you're planning to pay for banner
ads or ads in search engines, marketing is a big cost. You
can save money, though, by resorting to more 'guerrilla' techniques,
such as becoming involved in online communities than you think
might be interested in your website. The biggest free marketing
technique out there is SEO (search engine optimization), which
is when you build your website in a way that makes it more
attractive to search engines, getting you targeted visitors
for free.
Taking it Further
Once you've built your budget website, do you need to upgrade
it later on when you start to get lots of visitors? Often,
the answer is no. You might wish to buy a more prestigious
.com domain name, and you might want to pay a professional
designer to improve your design, but in most cases the path
from a budget website to a big one isn't all that costly either.
You might think you're building a website 'on the cheap' but,
really, that's the most sensible way to do it now while you
can go and spend thousands of dollars on software and hosting,
you're unlikely to see any real benefits at all.
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SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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