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Building A Budget Website
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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.
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 website domains for
nothing!
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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.
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