Affordable Small Business Web Site Development

The initial cost to develop a small business web site can be as low as $500. Even if the first year's cost for development, hosting, and submission runs $2000+, you'd be hard pressed to find a more cost effective way to advertise to new clients while providing support to existing clients. The cost of maintaining the site during subsequent years may be substantially less (usually just the monthly hosting fee, plus reasonable fees for updating existing information).

Client availability - 24 / 7 / 365

Clients can access your web site at any time of the day or night to obtain the provided information. Client needs may include product specs, catalogs, pictures, contact info, service plans, an e-mail address, a fax number, order forms, business hours, or a street map showing your location.

Save time and money

When properly utilized, placing frequently requested information on your web site will save a lot of time and money. Reduce the wear and tear on your fax machine or printer while reducing the cost of postage. Save on your printing costs for brochures and hand-outs by providing information on your web site. Reduce the number of interruptions that you and your employees experience by answering your client's FAQ (frequently asked questions) online.

Supplemental advertising

Your web site is a cost effective means of disseminating information to your clients or customers. In most cases, delivering the same information to your clients using more traditional methods would be cost prohibitive.

Promote yourself

Use your web site to tell your clients how good you are! Tell them about your specialty or your outstanding qualifications. Let them know how you're different from, or better than, the competition. Give new visitors to your web site a compelling reason to pick up the telephone and call you.

Convert your existing web site

A single template such as this page or ETNEWS.ORG delivers the content for the entire site. This highly efficient method greatly reduces the labor required to maintain a web site. While additional pages are sometimes required to process forms, a single template page can drive thousands of pages of content ... almost without limit. Text data, which may optionally include standard HTML markup, is stored in MySQL™ database tables. As the user clicks on the site links, page content is updated from the database. The template uses stylesheet classes in order to control the appearance.

Technical Details

The following is a partial list of the "behind the scenes" things that have to be done in order to set up web hosting and create your web site.

• Obtain an IP address from the web hosting company
• Run a Reverse Lookup on the IP address to make sure it's clean
• Register or transfer a domain name
• Configure a Nameserver to resolve the domain name
• Configure a directory structure for the files
• Password protect non-public directories
• Ban known hackers and bad robots from accessing the site
• Create MySQL™ database tables to hold site content
• Install interfaces to work with MySQL™ tables
• Develop an administrative interface for site management
• Configure a robots.txt file to discourage certain spiders
• Individually configure e-mail addresses or forwarders
• Design a layout for the main web page
• Consider whether to use browser-safe colors or not
• Edit and/or create 300+ lines of scripting code to run the pages
• Test the web pages for browser friendliness
• Develop and analyze META tag content
• Check images for ALT tags and dimensions
• Consider that different browsers render pages differently
• Consider the type of audience attracted to the site
• Develop a stylesheet to enhance / format page display
• Ensure that all images have been web optimized
• Test the validity of the HTML markup
• Test the validity of the stylesheet
• Test the integrity of the PHP scripting
• Configure mail processing for online Feedback forms
• Configure a Site Map linking to all pages on the web site
• Configure an appropriate Error 404 page
• Submit the site to major search engines
• Backup MySQL™ database tables periodically

Up Time

Up time for web sites has been running better than about 99.5%. Over the course of one year, there may be 10 hours or 20 hours (or possibly more) where your site is unavailable due to some sort of technical glitch. Life is neither perfect nor trouble-free.

Open SourceApplications

If I am hosting your web site, the following list of Open Source projects can be easily installed on your web site.

For your web site, you may also want to consider reviewing freely available open source projects available from hotscripts.com which could be installed to meet your web application requirements.

Legal considerations for web sites are summarized on FindLaw.com at Internet and E-Commerce.