Do it Yourself Websites - How to start a website for Cheap
Well, here we are, we’re a web design and development company, yet we are asked daily to do things for next to nothing. Unfortunately, we have to eat dinner just like the next guy so we really can not do it. But I guess it wouldn’t hurt to inform those of you who want to do your own sites, how to do it on the cheap. We would otherwise not divulge this information but at this point in our game, it’s all good, we have plenty of sites that pay us a fair price to develop for them.
So here are our best tips on making a cheap website:
1. Most people don’t know it but you can get a premade template for only about $50. and have it installed to your website, or install it yourself.
2. You can get cheap domain names and web hosting for as little as $4.95 per month that can handle these things.
3. Look for web hosts that carry “cpanel” which is a great little utility that will install programs on your website in a matter of minutes. You could start a blog in about 10 minutes using this utility. You can also install a complete shopping cart system with a click of a button.
4. Once you’ve installed a blog or shopping cart you’ll want to customize it. Use your template (above) and install the header portion into the header section of the blog or cart system that you’ve installed.
5. you’ll need to put in products into your store, that is usually done via an import of an excel file, or it can be done over time manually.
6. Once you’ve got yourself a website, you’ll need to promote it. The changes of you getting natural search are slim to nill. Don’t just think that you can put up a site and people will come to you. You have to go out and let them know you are there. You need to submit the site to google, yahoo, msn and others and you also need to go out and get listed in as many directories as you can. Establishing a presence on ebay can help you as well. If you use your userid on ebay as your domain name you really can’t lose on this count. Make sure to link your website from your ebay about me page.
7. Enroll yourself in all the online shopping portals and put up feeds as much as you can afford to gain some traffic, maximize your efforts by determining when customers are most likely to purchase, seasonally, you can do a pretty nice business without going broke. However, seasonal times are also more costly so go for items and keywords that are less expensive and targeted directly to the product that you have in stock. Don’t try to hit the main keyword on a budget.
8. Start a mailing list on your website, you don’t want to miss a single customer without having that online. You can easily create buttons for your website mailing list using a program such as aSending for an email marketing program. These types of programs provide the buttons and you just paste the code in the right place on your website.
9. If you need a merchant account check here for a quick cheap solution or use paypal.
10. You’ll need an ssl certication and can use the ones here for only $26.00 dollars a year. Why pay more, believe me, there is no reason.
11. If you don’t have the patience for all of the above, give us a call, we make great websites at reasonable prices.
There are many many other ways to make a web site yourself and make it work for you, but in general the theory is that if you have the money have a professional do it. It saves time, money and mistakes, but if you have the time you can learn, learn, learn and get quite far doing it yourself.
Check out the ebay and do it yourself directory for more
Any questions?