Affordable Website Design

Everyone looking for a web designer wants an affordable website design.  The question is not  how much a website costs you upfront, but how much more money a website can make for you over the long term.

You certainly can find a designer can provide you a site for $200, at this price don't expect any keyword or market research to be done before building the site.  You may get basic on-page SEO, but forget about any off-page SEO campaigns or an SEO strategy. Optimistically you will get a nice looking site that you can put on your business cards.  If this is good with you, then I'd recommend you save the $200 and use a third part sitebuilider and build your own site.  GOBI offers just such a sitebuilder, it's called Website Tonight and costs $4.05 a month.  Alternatively you could also purchase a hosting account and install Wordpress.  Wordpress can be worked into a solid business website, but it requires a little more expertise and involves a steeper learning curve than website tonight.
If you would like to a professional business site developed keep a few items in mind;

1. What does the designer offer in terms of developing targeted traffic?

Remember a site should provide a return on your investment.  In order to provide revenue, your site must have traffic.  What will your designer offer in terms of organic search engine optimization, and do they have an Internet marketing strategy that can generate natural, targeted web traffic to your site?  Make sure they clearly state what they can offer and what the addtional cost will be to you.  You should allocate at least as much resources into properly marketing your site and generating traffic, as you will into all other aspects of site design combined.  Lack of traffic is the number one cause of failure for business sites.

2. Make sure you own your site

This is an unfortunate situation I've seen to often when hired to redesign a site.  The previous designer will claim they own rights to some portion of the website.  It could be the domain name, the keywords, web programming code, pictures, or logo.  This is dirty and these sort of tactics give honest web designers a bad rap.  Make sure you own your site - you are paying for it.  The only rights a web designer should ask you for are; to include a "Designed by..." on your site and the right to use your site as part of their portfolio, and even then these are your rights to give, or refuse.

3. How much will it cost to maintain?

Ask what your designer will charge to update and maintain your site. An affordable website design, that ends up requiring 10 hours of maintenance at $100 can become expensive.  Ask whether they offer a content management system that allows you to easily make minor changes yourself.  Ask whether the quote includes hosting, if not how much do they charge for hosting?   A reasonable price for hosting can depend on several factors, but unless you are planning on receiving over 5,000 visitors a day, you should not pay over $25 a month for hosting.

4. What is included?

It is a simple question, you should get a simple answer, most web designers do a good job of listing out what services they will provide.  Use this to compare between several web design firms to find who is the best fit for you and will provide you the best value.