Get a Small Business Website for Less Than $110

Get a Small Business Website for Less Than $110

Are you a small business owner without a website? If you are, chances are you think it is too hard to make a website yourself and too expensive to hire someone else to do it for you. Fortunately for you, you're wrong. Here is how you can make yourself a professional business website for $108.94 with an annual recuring cost of only $8.99.

Every small business owner knows they need a web presence these days. There is nothing that can compare to the cost effectiveness of a website that advertises your services 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Even if you don't sell anything online or provide services outside of your own locale, a website can help your prospective customers learn about your services or simply find your address or phone number. Any business without a website is stuck in the 20th century and will almost certainly fail against others who understand leveraging technology to their advantage. The three most common misconceptions that prevent small business owners from getting a website are: lack of knowledge, cost of creation, and cost of maintenance. We'll examine each of these hurddles, and I will show you how you can get a website for your small business for less than a months worth of Starbucks.

Many small business owners believe that it takes a high level of technical knowledge to create a website. They get online to read about how to build a website and start hearing acronyms like HTML, XHTML, XML, PHP, or ASP and immediately their head starts spinning as they drool and babble incoherently. Who can blame them. Very few "geeks" are proficient in all these technologies, and without at least a basic understanding what these technologies are for, how can they be expected to sort through the all the help sites that discuss them? Fortunately you don't have to understand any of these terms to create a simple website for your company. You only need three things for a website: a domain name, a web host, and a web page. You can think of these three things as a business name, an office, and a product.

Your domain name can be the name of your company or product or even an ancronym (e.g., pepsi.com, mrclean.com, or cacld.net). The catch is that domain names must be unique. So if your company is 'Acme Industrial Widgets' you would not be able to get the domain name Acme.com because it is already owned by someone. A good thought to keep in mind is your region. Chances are that your small business only serves a city or metro area. Incorporating that into your domain name will greatly improve the chances that someone from your region will find your website because when people search for a local business, they'll often type "pizza in fargo" or "fargo pizza". If your domain name just so happens to be fargopizza.com, you're almost certainly going to be in the top 10 search results.

The web host is kind of like your landlord. They own the computers that make your web page available to the world. The services web hosts offer can vary as greatly as their costs. Just like some landlords offer a simple bare office space or malls offer a retail space with signage and group advertising, some web hosts may offer basic hosting while others offer a whole suite of website creation, optomization, and marketing tools. As you can expect, the more services offered, the more it will cost. But, I'll let you in on a secret. You don't need any of these services for the creation of a small business website. The only tools you need are your keyboard, an internet connection, and someone to point you in the right direction. So keep reading!

The last part of the formula for your small business website is a web page. This is the part that your visitors see and the part that will contain your virtual sales pitch. This will be the most dificult part because it will require you to describe your products and services. If you have a good grasp of what you do, how you do it, and why someone should buy it then this part will be a breeze for you. If you can't imagine how to describe the value of your offerings to an imaginary someone, then this part will take a while. Never fear though, unlike a yellow page ad or radio commercial that is set in stone when finished, you can change your webpage at any time.

Now that you have a basic understanding of the three things required for your company website, how do you aquire them? First, you must get a domain name. Some people see GoDaddy commercials and buy one there while others use Network Solutions because they were one of the first domain registrars. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of companies that can sell you a domain name. I recommend 1and1.com because they are very inexpensive (unlike Network Solutions) and don't nickel and dime you to death (like GoDaddy did to me). All of these companies offer webhosting in addition to domain names, but you won't need the level of services they offer for your basic small business website. All you need to do is buy the domain name. Read on to find out which webhosting company you should use.

Once you have purchased your domain name, you must get a web host. The webhost I recommend for your small business website is WhyPark.com. I recommend WhyPark because they charge a one time fee of $99.95 for lifetime hosting and have very simple tools that will allow you to create your company's website in a matter of minutes. There are quite a few premade templates, and many more templates are freely available on my website as well as others. The only tricky part in this process is pointing your new domain name to the WhyPark servers. Where ever you buy your domain name should have some help documentation that can describe how to perform this task, and some may even be willing to walk you through this process over the phone.

Creating your webpage is the easiest and hardest part. WhyPark's servers take care of the HTML editing, all you have to do is type all the things you want to say about your business into a box much like you would when typing out a letter in Microsoft Word. If you managed to spend 5 or 10 minutes at http://www.w3schools.com taking their HTML tutorials, the option for entering your text as richly formatted HTML is available as well. At this point, you're dependent on your own creativity. If you know that you want your business's address and phone number on the site, type that in. If you want to create a web page for every product you sell, you can do that as well. In fact, if you're really savvy, you can integrate PayPal buttons onto each product page and turn you site into an e-commerce site, but that's a tutorial for another day.

Now that you've seen just how easy and inexpensive it is to create a basic website for you business what are you waiting for? If this were a tutorial on how to get a super cheap yellow page ad for life, you'd be all over it. Once you realize that this IS in fact a tutorial on how to get a super cheap "yellow page ad" for life, I have no doubt that you'll join the 21st century and your business will succeed.