For some reason, lately a lot of people have asked me about cheap websites for the smaller business that isn’t looking to spend a lot of money on a full website. Perhaps it is the shade of the looming financial situation that is causing some to want small, cheaper sites, but regardless, we just need to talk about what this really means to the balance sheet.

Cheap website options. Firstly, there are a few options to choose from. The most obvious choice is a template. Templates are pre-constructed websites that are already designed and developed where you just take the files (flash, dreamweaver, CSS, HTML) and work within them to change your site to your liking. This could be good for some that are already familiar with code and the programs mentioned before, but even then, there are a few things to consider.

A template is not branded for your business, it is, well, a template for anyone to use. This not only effects how your brand (company image, logo, identity) is perceived within the public, but it also has a adverse effect on how easily your website is found (search engine optimization). There are elements within a website from the meta tags, page titles, alt tags, header tags, html links, html text, xml site maps to submission of site maps to google that greatly effect how "visible" your site is to the greater public. This effects how people find your website through the search engines (organic search is what it is referred to). Having a template site usually means others out there will have the same site (structurally speaking) as you and google and the other search engines discount that.

Another cheap, small option is to use a web-creation online service. This is a step down from templates since you have to relinquish some elements of control. Generally, these options require you to host the website through them and then you can update some text on the site. These are not optimized sites for your business and i cannot recommend any that i have seen to-date.

Blogs are another cheap option for those do-it-yourselfers out there. In fact, instead of a template or an online website creation option, i would and have recommended a wordpress blog as a cheap/free option to those that have asked. The reason for this is that a blog can be expanded and added to over time and, thus, add to your visibility over time. That is one of the reasons that we often incorporate a blog within a website.

The final option is to have a basic site created for you. This would require some expense to have this designed and developed. As stated previously, it is a choice of whether to spend little to nothing on branding or have a site that is branded and easier to be found online.

Over time, i think that you will find that you get out of a website what you put into the website. In other words, if you are looking for the cheapest option, you will get less of a return. This is a basic marketing principal but one that is often thought about for websites, for some strange reason.

Another principle for websites is that a website that is not found doesn’t do a lot of good for you. This means that both the creation of the site as well as some marketing afterwards should be considered so that you ensure traffic to the site.

Good luck!
-jeremy

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, marketing, tip, web. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.