How to do business on the web.

What Price for a Web Site?

This articles summaries most of the real "costs" involved in developing a web site and getting (and keeping) your business online.

If you want to jump to the chase, and find out what we reckon an average small business might pay, then click here for the summary of costs.

Domain Name Registration

These fees range from around $60 - $165 every two years for Australian domains (see this page for a complete break down), down to around $25 - $30 a year for global domain names (.com, .org, .info etc) depending on the registrar used and the number of years you register for.

Domain Name Parking

Some ISP's charge nothing for this service, while others charge $100+ a year. You should expect to pay a median amount to park a domain name with an ISP and that should include some sort of email forwarding service as well.

Web Server Rental

Web Server rental prices vary quite significantly.

You can get totally "free" services which may show ads on or behind your pages. These can often be slow to serve pages, and low on features.

Paid services go from $10 a month to $thousands a year, depending on the type and size of server you really need.

The "average" small business should expect to pay no more than $600-$700 a year to rent a web server that is appropriate to their needs.

For a business web site that involves some serious database work, or programming, or secure e-commerce capability, then you can expect the rental to be more. In some cases, a figure of $250+ a month is realistic for a full featured server that can handle lots of intensive work.

Web Site Design

In most cases, a poorly designed web site will not work well (if at all) for you!

If you do have a good understanding of design principles and copywriting, then have a go at it yourself. If you don't, leave it to a person with skills in those areas.

The average small business will invest between $500 and $1000 to get a web developer to create a site that:

• provides all the essential information users expect
• is unique to your business
• has your "look and feel"
• is easy for your users to work through
• encourages your visitors to want to deal with you
• makes it easy for them to deal with you
• works for you - attempts to achieve your objectives
• is search engine friendly

For example, SSL certificates (to carry out secure e-commerce transactions) can cost up to $700 a year. Remote gateways to banks to collect "real-time" credit card information can also be costly to implement. Throw in a "shopping cart" program (these seem vary considerably in price from $1000 to $50,000+) and your costs can begin to sky rocket.

Web Site Promotion

The cheapest way to do that is the one people most often forget about, and it's also the simplest! Make sure that you include your URL (address) in absolutely everything you send out from your business - your email, letterheads, "With Compliments" slips, invoices, statements, business cards, advertising materials, brochures, etc - everything!

The next step is to "register" your site with search engines. Over time, these will account for about 80 percent of your traffic. Many of these are free, although quite a few are now moving to "pay-per-click" or "pay-for-listing" business models.

With pay-per-click engines, you "bid" on certain key words, and pay that amount every time someone clicks through to your site... You can also pay a minimum $20+ USD a month even if no-one clicks through.

The bigger "pay-per-listing" engines - Looksmart and Yahoo - are now charging 100's of dollars on an annual basis to review your site for possible inclusion in their directories.

Hundreds of other sites will include a link to your site for nothing, or you can choose to pay from $5 upwards to list your site details with them.

The key here is to be selective about the sites you approach. Make sure they have the target audience you are after!

There are also paid submission services you can use to get your site listed on search engines. The costs of these vary considerably. A once only $5 can get you listed with 300 search engines. Or you can make monthly investments of $50 USD for regular submissions of your site. Again, it's up to you to consider the pros and cons of these schemes, and what can fit into your budget.

You can also do it yourself with submission software like Web Position Gold or SubmitWolf.

The key with any sort of promotion is to keep doing it, and do it regularly!

Web Site Maintenance

But it IS important to

1. keep the information on your site current in the first place, and then
2. update and refresh the information to encourage repeat visits to your site.

Secondly, apart from giving people a reason to come back to your site at a later date, updating the information also encourages search engines to revisit... and reindex...

It's been suggested that this alone helps improve your placement in some search engines.

Summary

To summarise the costs for each component for an "average" small business to get onto the Internet:

Domain Registration: maximum $70 pa
Server Rental: maximum $700 pa
Site Design: average $750 once only
Promotion: allow $200 pa in your budget
Updating: allow from $250 pa if you can't do it yourself

and don't forget your dial-up costs - i.e. the regular monthly fee for you to access the Internet from your work/home computer. That can easily add another $300+ every year you need to budget for.

All up, in the first year, the "average" small business could pay between $1500 to $2270 to get their business (and themselves) connected to the Internet. In the second (and subsequent years) this would reduce to around $1000 - $1500.

If you still think that's way to expensive, then check out a much cheaper yet still effective solution!

What to do now...