You've acquired the perfect URL for your Web business. Now what? In an economic recession, the last thing you want to do is spend thousands of dollars hiring a professional Web designer to create a site for you. Fortunately, there are other more cost-effective options available.
Consider using a Web template and customizing it. A template lays out the look and feel of your website. Think of it as a blank form populated with generic information and you get to fill in all the blanks with your own content and programming to customize it.
While many companies offer design templates, not all deliver the same services. Here are my top three picks to help you get started.
• Intuit, the California-based company that makes Quicken, QuickBooks and TurboTax, also provides great resources for those looking to start a Web business with little money. Go to http://www.intuit.com/ and click on ''Get a Website.'' There you will find more than 2,000 site templates that you can download and customize to your liking. Intuit even offers a free 30-day trial, which includes creation of a five-page website, Web hosting and free tech support.
If you like the Intuit-created site, pay $4.99 a month to host it once your trial is over. Do you want to work with a skilled designer rather than do it yourself? For as little as $599, Intuit offers packages where their designers will design your site according to your specs, including e-commerce features that allow you to sell products on your site. That's a fraction of what you would have to pay a Web design firm.
Intuit's package also includes site metrics, so you can see how many people are visiting your site each day and which pages they're visiting the most.
• Template Monster -- Go to http://www.templatemonster.com/. One of my websites, http://www.chickcentric.com/ started as a version of a template I found on Template Monster. The company offers several options. You can purchase a template for as low as $69, which in essence allows you to download and customize the template with an understanding that others will also download that template at any time. If you absolutely love a template and don't want anyone else to buy that design, you can pay what's called a ''unique price,'' typically $3,000 to $5,000 to ensure that no one else can buy that design -- and it is uniquely yours.
Like Intuit, Template Monster offers several packages including Turnkey Websites, where for $49.95 a month and up you can get a professionally designed site, unlimited hosting, fully licensed stock photos for use on your site and three hours of webmaster support every month. You can take this package for a test drive with a free seven-day trial offer.
• Yahoo has a similar site-building service. Although they don't offer a free trial, they do guarantee to refund your money in the first 30 days if you're not completely satisfied with their product. Go to http://www.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ to check out the services offered. Yahoo offers an easy-to-use control panel that allows you to check your site stats.
Now that you know how to build a professional website cheaply, in my next column I'll go over what you'll need to know to provide your users and customers with an experience on your site that will keep them coming back to it over and over again!
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