Setting up a website for the first time is an extremely exciting step to take. It is a signal that you are determined to make your business a success.You foresee getting thousands of new clients and your name becoming a household item due to the exposure that your company or website will be receiving throughout the world

But we need to make it very clear here that acquiring your website is only the first step in a long journey. There are other costs involved in setting up a website apart from the design costs.

The following aspects are all costs that go into setting up and running of a business website:

1. Direct cost of creating the website. Whether you do it yourself, or whether you pay for it, you have to remember that your time is also worth money.

2. Direct cost of marketing your website. Your website will NOT just start generating traffic all on its own. You are going to have to first spend money on promoting your website before you are going to see any return on investment. Setting up a new website with no promotion behind it is like setting up a shop in a dark alley with no advertising. There will be no feet visiting that shop! You need to get your website out of its dark alley and into the light and that will cost money!

Even if you do the majority of this work yourself, you once again have to consider the fact that your time is worth money, and you should think carefully whether you want to invest your time in this activity, or rather spend it on other aspects of your business.

3. Indirect or direct costs of updating your website with fresh content. It is absolutely essential to update your website with new and regular content. At the minimum you will have to update new contact information, prices and special offers. But it is far better to update your site with additional information about your company and industry to capture more visitors who might be looking for the very information that you are providing. A site filled with lots of information about your industry also establishes you as the expert in the field and builds trust in your visitors and potential customers.

So how much SHOULD you spend on your website? If you are a start-up business, it is a very appealing thought to spend as little as possible on your site, since you probably do not have lots of cash to throw around.

That is understandable, but be careful of being penny-wise and pound-foolish. A badly designed website can be extremely detrimental to the image of your company, and if the technology choices that you might inadvertently tie yourself into due to opting for a low cost, or cheap option, are the wrong choices, you will probably find it quite expensive to extricate yourself from these design decisions.

What do we mean by this?

I have often seen websites that have obviously been done ‘on the cheap’.

The detrimental effects of this are often that:

1. The website quality overall is low, with poorly designed graphics, layout and functionality. This gives a bad impression of your company.

2. Often, inexperienced web designers design the site using frames or use javascript for navigation. This makes the site inaccessible for search engines, thereby rendering the site completely useless from a search engine traffic perspective.

Websites can be very costly (quality takes time, and time equals money, it is as simple as that), so if you are just starting out with your first website and your company is cash strapped, by all means try and go for a lower cost option, but educate yourself first of all the options, and if you can, go for the best quality website that your money can buy – it will save you in the long term.