Five Steps to Creating an Affordable Website

1 Purchase your domain name

Use Godaddy.com to find the perfect domain name for your website. They'll try to sell you on twenty different upgrades when purchasing your domain name, but just purchase the domain to start with. The only upgrade that you may consider is purchasing the domain for several years. You get a better price on the yearly cost and it's good for search engine optimization if the domain name reflects that it'll be around for a while.

2 Keep it Simple

Start out with a simple five-page website. You may think it's going to be easy to fill up five pages, but it'll most likely take you a few weeks to come up with enough content to fill the pages. The standard five-page website has a home page, about us, services, blog, and a contact page. One of the major roadblocks we see when it comes to websites is clients getting overwhelmed and the project comes to a halt. If you keep the initial project to five pages, your project can be easily completed within a few weeks and you can easily expand it once you have the site up and running.

3 Complete a Rough Sketch of the Layout

This will help the designer of your website know how you'd like the menu, graphics, & copy to look on each page. It'll also give you a good idea of how many photos you'll need to provide or how many graphics you'd like the designer to create or purchase for you. This is a great way to keep the cost down because the layout is already agreed upon. You can spend hours and hours reformatting and moving around content, which will only end up costing you more money in the long run.

4 Photos / Graphics

If you already have professional photos of your product and your employees then you are in great shape. Most do not, and in this case we recommend using iStockphoto or Getty Images. Pick out the professional photos that you'd like to see on your website and hold off on purchasing them until your first consultation with your designer.

5 Writing the content/copy

The copy within your website needs to be specific, so keep it simple. A customer faced with long paragraphs and explanations of what you do will most likely get bored or be too busy to read it all. Visitors need to be able to quickly scan through headers to get a brief idea of what you do. If you really struggle with writing, we highly suggest that you ask your designer for a referral or seek out an experienced copy writer yourself.