Jeffrey Duck ⋅ Deltona, FL Deploy Tech Services ⋅ 30 years experience

Hi Ryan,

It's easy to get sucked into building a site yourself then learning it's not your thing, or paying someone to build one then only to learn that you are their first customer.

There are a couple of EXTREMELY easy to use and high quality website builders but most require hosting and charge a rather high monthly fee to compensate for their site builder.

weebly.com has an inexpensive option, creates very high quality and modern sites, and is easy enough to use that I would recommend it to ANYBODY. Also the same company that owns weebly owns the hosting company, hostgator.com. It's a little known secret that with any hosting account with hostgator, you can use the weebly website builder and they have a money back guarantee.

I'd recommend signing up with them and try building your site first. If you don't like the results, you've lost nothing and you've learned a little bit about making a site.

If you decide you want to have someone else make a site for you, I would check their work carefully. A lot of people will make fake sites or mock-ups to add to their portfolio. I would be sure you see what they've written, right-click on the pages and look at the source code to be sure it looks organized. Then be sure that, at least, most of what you see on their website is actually live on the customer sites. Follow up with a couple of customers to ask how they liked the developer. Find out how well they communicated, who decided what the site would look like, who provided the content and generally how much work the customer did and how much the developer did.

Finally, if necessary, verify any graphics the developer claims they created were in fact created by them. You can open Google then select images then cut-and-paste an image into Google and it will find any similar images. I've often found inexpensive site developer who have illegally scalped images from other site and even worst, claimed credit for creating it.

Good luck! How to get an affordable website is really a very hard question to answer.

Ryan Brown ⋅ Melbourne, FL Patriot Investment Partners ⋅ 2 years experience

Thank you everyone for all your help. I'm going to take a good look at these current recommendations. I hope something bears some fruit.

If anyone else has any questions or comments that could help me, I'd love to hear it.

Ryan

Robert Chilcoat ⋅ San Diego, CA Unattended Card Payments Inc. ⋅ 14 years experience

Hi Ryan,

Do it yourself! I suggest using WordPress. It is a fantastic tool and it offers a lot of flexibility. Building your own website will provide you with the necessary understanding of online marketing which will transfer over to many other aspects of building a successful and money generating website. For SEO purposes WordPress is great. There are a lot of things you will need to do to get your website noticed. As previously mentioned "content is king." Check into local adult education programs. Here in San Diego there are free classes on WordPress and SEO. Another important aspect might be social media and you business. Good luck!

Ming Lai ⋅ Alhambra, CA Humanist Films, LLC ⋅ 20 years experience

Hi Ryan!

To build an inexpensive professional website, I would recommend trying Squarespace and using one of their templates:
http://www.squarespace.com

Their pricing is reasonable:
http://www.squarespace.com/pricing/

And their templates are nicely designed:
http://www.squarespace.com/templates/

Whether you build your website yourself or hire somebody else to do it, it’s important to think of your needs, how your website can best represent you, and how it can grow with you.

You are your own brand. So your website should powerfully convey your brand and be able to expand with it.

A good example is Apple. Their website embodies their brand—minimalist, intuitive, and modern. And it’s able to accommodate their constant introduction of new products.
http://www.apple.com

I’ve known many people who built their own websites or even hired others to build them only to abandon them later and re-build new ones because they didn’t look professional enough or they didn’t meet their growing needs.

Great websites, like homes, should be beautiful and timeless and yet be able take care of the ever-changing needs of their owners.

It just takes a lot of foresight and pre-planning.

Hope this helps. Good luck with your website!

Lyn Rundell ⋅ San Francisco, CA HERO Marketing ⋅ 27 years experience

Hi Ryan,

I believe it's worth having it done, rather than trying to do it yourself. Especially if you've never done it before. I do marketing for living, and often clear when something was not done professionally. It's easy now to find somebody who will do something like this for only $150-200. Feels worth it to me. You can try checking things like craigslist in your area, or just Google it.

Good luck!

Curt Middlebrook ⋅ Largo, FL U.S. Navy, Commander ⋅ 20 years served

Much as all things done in the service, it's all about the requirements. Before you go anywhere, you need to sit with a good adviser and lay out the end game of the business plan, then lay out the staged plan to get there. I, just this weekend, got a call from a client, in a panic, not being able to know set up a customer relations manager (CRM) like system. Her husband began a business and I implored them to call first. They didn't. Now they have an employee, and used Wix for a free site, the option is to pay for something like Zoho or SugarCRM, and pay for email, or to save their content and get a hosting company that allows you to grow with out constantly opening your wallet, bad enough if you're in one company, worse if you have to spread your service needs across several sites. The chance for a lost payment can take you down, but if the functions are under one roof, so to speak, at least you have one communications pipeline to track.

While GoDaddy has the branding in the market and is a solid technically proficient host, quite honestly, the cost of their services is more than other excellent providers (I use BlueHost and PowWeb both), and they keep charging for adding on functionality, email being one, but have seen many other great platforms as well.

To follow up on the current discussion regarding my client's current struggle, he's the right size to begin with PowWeb, ($50.16/year) with unlimited storage, unlimited email addresses (how to align those and training the prospect/client base to use them is an entirely extra discussion. Domain control is integrated right onto your control panel, you can add additional domains if needed, and one click installs fro WordPress, plus, in Rob's case, vTiger CRM could have quickly been added and configured for multiple users and at no additional cost.

In your case, neither of those might work, or they may. It all depends on your requirements.

Get by a dry erase board and figure out what it will grow to be, then walk the dog back, finding the best way and tools to integrate smoothly, only doing "throw away" work when it is absolutely necessary and planned (such as using a lesser capability until the revenue/size reaches a certain point to transition to some tools that may require a bit of rework.

DIY is all good, so long as you know it's the hands on understanding behind it that gets it into context.

My regular consulting to small business clients is: Free is great so long as it supports you. Free is dangerous when it detracts from your work, or professional image. In the "if it's free, it's for me" world, you may find the domain name you got "for free" isn't really yours, and a year from now, having now built and audience out on the web, you get ready to grow up and find out it was never yours in the first place. There's ways to manage that effectively, but I learned this by doing such work with small businesses (and for my self, beginning as a milblogger), and have seen some very ugly outcomes, and have helped a few through the minefield to avoid the problems and lost money.

Hope this helps.

James Moore ⋅ Ozawkie, KS ⋅ 10 years experience

Hi Ryan,

I recently went through the process of creating my own site. I choose Wix for a number of reasons. For one, it is free to create you site. Second, they provide many professional templates for you to choose from. Wix also provides domain registration and hosting at a reasonable fee. It will take time just figuring out how to use the web tools. How to add pictures, boxes for text information, choosing color schemes and adjusting them. You want to have a logo that represents your site's purpose and mission. Pictures are important for making you site standout. Goole Images is where you can search for pics to download, but be careful about copy rights and protection. When you pick your favorite web theme, you may use much of what is there. On the flipside, others areas of the site you may want to revamp and add your own preferences. It is truly a learning process. Don't be surprised if you make a million tweaks and modifications before it is to your satisfaction.

I hope this helps.
best regards.
Jim

Amit Chaudhary ⋅ San Jose, CA Doordash, Silicon Valley Software Company ⋅ 20 years experience

The most used in Silicon Valley for general website is http://www.weebly.com/
It is a resume supplement, https://about.me/ is better, see http://about.me/people/popular

Just try, both are free, then if needed use someone from odesk.com, etc to fill in the pieces

Naomi Finkel ⋅ Westlake Village, CA Say It With Words Marketing & Corporate Communications ⋅ 30 years experience

Contact the Art Department at local community colleges.
They will place you in touch with a student.
Naomi Finkel

Mary Bock ⋅ Austin, TX The University of Texas ⋅ 30 years experience

Hi Ryan -
It's pretty easy to do it yourself these days with WordPress or Wix -- depending on what you're doing, it might be the simplest solution. Also, codeacademy.com provides free lessons on coding, if that helps.
Good luck!
mary

Barbara Jack ⋅ New Baltimore, MI General Motors ⋅ 24 years experience

Hi Ryan

There are plenty of free, professional looking easy to build website apps out there - just go to Google and search for 'free template website design' Here's one: http://www.freewebsitetemplates.com/

You should find one that meets your needs... all you need to do is fill in the template areas with your information.

There is a small fee to get a domain name and get a website hosted. Check out Go Daddy.com - https://www.godaddy.com/domains/domain-name-search.aspx?isc=hos1g179&ci=87929

Hope this helps

Barbara J