Building a Budget Website
Once upon a time, building a website was very expensive. Now,
though, you can have a site up and running for the price of a
used book, if you're frugal and careful. Getting the cheapest
website you can is a great first step on the ladder, to get
started on the web and see if it's for you.
Five-Dollar Domains
If you're willing to take the less popular domains like .info,
or some of the ones for specific countries, then you should
easily be able to get your hands on a domain for less than $5.
Some countries, such as .tk (the small island of Tokelau), even
offer their domains for nothing!
Free Software
Nowadays, it's easily possible to build a website using nothing
but software you can get for free - most of the best scripting
languages are free, and each one has had a lot of free software
built for it by hobbyists. Check out sourceforge.net, which is a
big repository of free software.
You might think that free software would be less functional than
paid-for software, but you'd be wrong. Plenty of free software
is simply implementations of standard software, and it works
perfectly well - if you want a forum, for example, there's no
clear advantage in paying massive license fees to vBulletin (the
biggest seller of forum software) instead of just installing the
free phpBB. The free software gives you more flexibility, and
yet comes at no cost.
Free software has become an ideological movement, for people who
want to be able to modify their own software, and much of the
free software out there is quickly becoming widely-used and
standard. Using free software doesn't make you look cheap,
because users are used to seeing it everywhere - even better,
the chances are that they already know how to use it.
Templates
Depending on what kind of website you're running, you could use
the design templates that come with your free software - they're
usually perfectly adequate. If you don't want to do that, then a
quick look around at a site like templatemonster.com is sure to
turn up something suitable for your website that only costs a
few dollars.
Pay as You Go Hosting
Instead of asking you to pay monthly for hosting, more and more
hosts are starting to offer 'pay as you go' hosting, which means
that you only pay for what you use. This saves you a lot of
money, because websites that are starting out rarely use all the
features and bandwidth they're paying their host to provide.
At nearlyfreespeech.net, for example, you add money to an
account and then pay one dollar for each gigabyte of bandwidth
you use. Most of these hosts allow you to start an account with
very little money - the minimum is usually $5. If you keep your
site light on graphics, that first $5 can last you a very long
time.
Guerrilla Marketing
Finally, one of the biggest costs associated with any website is
marketing it - whether you're planning to pay for banner ads or
ads in search engines, marketing is a big cost. You can save
money, though, by resorting to more 'guerrilla' techniques, such
as becoming involved in online communities than you think might
be interested in your website. The biggest free marketing
technique out there is SEO (search engine optimisation), which
is when you build your website in a way that makes it more
attractive to search engines, getting you targeted visitors for
free.
Taking it Further
Once you've built your budget website, do you need to upgrade it
later on when you start to get lots of visitors? Often, the
answer is no. You might wish to buy a more prestigious .com
domain name, and you might want to pay a professional designer
to improve your design, but in most cases the path from a budget
website to a big one isn't all that costly either. You might
think you're building a website 'on the cheap' but, really,
that's the most sensible way to do it now - while you can go and
spend thousands of dollars on software and hosting, you're
unlikely to see any real benefits at all.