Web Site Building
May 11, 2008 by Stephen S Alison
Once upon a time, web site building 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.
Nowadays, web site building is easy 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 for web site building would be less functional than paid-for software, but you’d be wrong. 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 web site building 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.
Depending on what kind of web site building you are planning, 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 building that only costs a few dollars.
Finally, one of the biggest costs associated with any web site building is marketing it – whether you’re planning to pay for banner ads or ads in search engines, website marketing is a big cost. You can save money on web site building though, by becoming involved in online communities that you think might be interested in your website. The biggest free marketing technique out there is SEO (search engine optimisation), which is when you organise your web site building in a way that makes it more attractive to search engines, getting you targeted visitors for free.
Once you’ve built your budget website, you may need to upgrade it later on when you start to get lots of visitors. You might wish 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.
Additional Reading:
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