The following article will help you gain clarity on this issue.
First of all, let us consider the costs of having a website. A domain name with sufficient amount of space (that also includes a database support for interactive websites) costs under $30 per annum. This is roughly $2.5 / month.
Then comes the designing and maintenance costs. Depending on your requirement, web design can cost as little as $50-$100. There is no upper limit; it can go into several thousands depending on what exactly you want and who is doing it. Ideally, you should ask your friends and associates to refer web designers who have done a good job for them and also charged reasonably. Prepare your requirements in advance before taking quotes. Be very clear on what exactly you want for your website. This will save you a lot of pain. Be sure to cross check the quotes with sites like elance. Discuss the maintenance charges also, if you need to update your site often.
There is another option where you can save on web design costs if you don't need a very fancy / customized design. Most hosting providers will offer you site builder options at a nominal cost. In fact, you can even use a blog platform like wordpress or a CMS platform like joomla and drupal. Most hosting providers will offer fantastico support, which enables you to install these opensource softwares with a few mouse clicks. I would advice you to first go with one of these options, preferably the wordpress / CMS option before you spend on web design.
Once you've worked out these costs, you now need to consider the returns. Business is all about ROI (Return On Investment) and you should seriously track all leads and / or orders you receive through your website. First of all, you need to accept the fact that you won't start getting orders the moment your website is live. “If you build it, they will come” doesn't work here. You need to work towards promoting your website.
There are several online and offline ways to do this. For offline promotion, you should include your website URL in every piece of communication as you can, like visiting cards, yellow page ads, invoices, quotations, etc.
For online promotion, you should first make it a point to include your URL in email signatures and forum post signatures. Next, you should consider spending a little on PPC (Pay Per Click) ads. The most important online promotion is free traffic from search engines. If you want to win the SEO game, there are only three things that you really need to concentrate on:
1. Unique content: Don't ever copy content from other websites, create your own. If required, hire a decent copywriter, but first start on your own.
2. Updated content: Search engines love websites which have new content added regularly, so make it a point to add something new to your website at least once a week. If there are no new products or services that you add, consider adding some latest news in your industry. Or you can simply add useful tips that cater to your industry.
3. Backlinks: The more websites that link to yours, the more weight search engines give to your ranking. So try to get more websites linking to you, preferably from related content sites. You can also write articles that are beneficial to your targeted audience and submit them at article directories. Remember to add your website link in the author's bio (you are seeing this in action right now; check out the bio following this article).
These are the three pillars that SEO stands on. If you do nothing else except follow these, you will get much more targeted traffic than your competitors. You don't even need an SEO consultant.
If you can generate enough business from your website, it makes sense in continuing it. It then becomes an investment with good returns. You should give it a try for at least 2 years, to track proper ROI. Once you're fairly successful, you can think of other ways to improve your website. If you're making more than you're spending, its time to take your website to the next level. Start by hiring / outsourcing people to write content for you. Use lead generation tactics by giving away free reports in exchange for people to signup to your mailing list.
While your website is certainly an investment worth making, you can also claim the costs as business expenses! Consult your accountant for details.
Instant Activation Web Hosting
You need to rely on a web host with years of experience in order to meet your needs and in order to keep things running almost 24 hours a day.
Basically, the Internet is car parking and web hosting is the car parking space. It is the space on the net where you'll have to park your home page, which will be later displayed in that space so that others can see it.
All the pages of your site/post are stored on a server and it makes them accessible to the Internet. Your HTML document domain is linked to an IP address of a specific computer. When someone types your domain into their browser, the IP is located and your post is loaded from your homepage host.
In online marketing the first thing you need to decide is what type of page presentation you would need for your business. There are different types of them available in the market.
If you go for the free one you will have banners on top of all the pages of your post. There will be limit in customizing the post. People usually don't prefer such plans because of advertisements placed on the top of every page.
Other ways of presentation would be through 'Shared Hosting', which many Internet users commonly use. It is useful for small businesses, as they don't require much frequency for their sites. Even in shared presentation the options offered by the host are very limited.
In 'Dedicated Hosting' you have much more room to grow your business. Here, you don't have to worry about the frequency used by your post because you have to pay good amount of dollars for to use it.
You can have as many sites as you want on the same server and the server can handle large amount of traffic to your HTML document.
Most of the net users know about the variety of plans available but the most difficult task is choosing the best presentation platform in the market. To find the best home for your HTML documents you have to go as per your budget and needs.
You are likely to get confused as there are lots of plans on the net providing same services. So there are few important things, which shall be kept in mind before choosing a presentation platform.
1. Find out how much disk space you need. Most home pages require less than 60 megabytes, but if you have images, videos and audios in your home page, you might require more space for your layout.
2. Before going for a plan, determine how much bandwidth your website can use or determine your data transfer needs. Data transfer refers to the amount of data a web host allows your site visitors to access per month.
You will be charged more or your HTML document will be shut down if you exceed your bandwidth. Therefore you have to carefully determine the bandwidth used by your site and then choose the anchoring plan.
Having multiple domains is a good idea but make sure that the platform you have chosen allows you to have multiple domains on their anchoring service.
3. Make sure that the language used for your homepage is supported by the anchoring service whether it is PHP or ASP otherwise it will not function properly.
4. "Get It Right The First Time", if you make a wrong decision while choosing the right plan you can't even think of the damage that will be done to your business.
You have to consider the speed and reliability of the service taken, the different features offered by them and the quality of their support service. If you get money back guarantee then that would be an advantage.
5. Do a detailed research on the plans available on Internet. Once you are confident about the presenting company then only sign up.
There are numerous companies who would compete to grab your money. They come up with lot of ways to convince the customers.
Some great ways to save your money while choosing the affordable deals are:
1. Look for free domain name registration: you can easily find companies offering cheap anchoring who will not charge for domain name registration.
They will give you everything in one shot and helps in saving money as well as your precious time.
2. Multiple domain presenting: It is another better way to save money. There are many hosting companies that allow you to host more than one homepage on one hosting plan.
You can register as many domains as you want and can use the place of same presenting plan for all of your domains. This can be of use for those who run different sites at the same time.
3. Look for forums: There can be many special offers which are not available on hosting websites but you can reach them on forums.
4. Remove the features you don't want: Sometimes companies provide you with some extra features like extra bandwidth or some software. But if your site doesn't need that extra bandwidth you can exchange that feature with some extra RAM or CPU power.
5. You can ask for free upgrades: Normally such companies are open to negotiations. Instead for asking a discount you can ask for free upgrades.
6. Long term discounts: When you choose long term anchoring you usually obtain 10-15% off. You get discount on bulk order.
7. Last but not the least, you can go for best packages available as per your needs where you can get 10-15 MBs free storage place with monthly packages.
To conclude I would like to say "Whatever you do just monitor your website everyday" and it is really essential to know that your site is up.
Both Nirjara Rustom & Ajeet Khurana are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Nirjara Rustom has sinced written about articles on various topics from Marriage, Computers and The Internet and Debts Loans. Nirjara Rustom looks after the support staff at a. Nirjara Rustom's top article generates over 14800 views. to your Favourites.
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