Setting Up Your First Real Website – What Are The Costs Involved?


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Mitz Pantic
My name is Milica Pantic (aka Mitz) and I am a serial full-time blogger. I started out with one website many years ago and it went so well, I sold my businesses and began living the internet dream. Since then I have been perfecting the system of blogging and building Wordpress websites to earn money online. This is an ever changing business and I love the challenge. Please feel free to download my favorite FREE REPORTS if you are interested in improving your blogging business or starting one from scratch.
Mitz Pantic
Mitz Pantic
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First real websiteCongratulations on your decision to build a website and enter the world of online marketing! This is one of the greatest business decisions you can make.You might be just taking the plunge from free hosting blogs to paid, but either way, good on you!

Having been in your position, it’s easy for me to figure out your apprehensions on proceeding with your idea. Unlike the past where you had limited options on everything from domain providers to content management systems, today’s online world can offer you more options that can surpass your decision-making skills.

Instead of worrying about making the best choices, you should think about how to make the right choices on everything. Your choices should be a combination of levelheaded pricing and quality.

Here Is A Step-By-Step Guide On How To Make The Right Decisions For Your First Website:

Step 1: Choosing A Hosting Provider

It doesn’t matter if you want to start a website, blog, e-commerce store or an online community, a web hosting account is the first thing you need.

You can effortlessly find hundreds of options and this might sound like a great deal at first but short listing your options to choose someone reliable is quite tough.

The more you read about tutorials on “˜how to choose the right hosting provider,’ the more things start getting complicated. In brief, pricing is not the sole determination factor in choosing a good hosting service provider.

You need great uptime, good customer support, SEO tools and useful tutorials that ensure easy programming.

Hosting providers like HostGator, BlueHost and Certified Hosting are good service providers but there are many more. There are many web hosting companies fighting for your business.

Never choose the basic hosting plan that allows you to host a single website because with 1 or 2 extra dollars per month, you will usually get hosting plans that provide unlimited number of website/blog hosting.

Cost: A baby plan (single website hosting) starts for as low as $2/month and can go up to $7/month while unlimited number of sites hosting plans is typically in the $8-$12/month range. I personally only pay $10 a month to host 20 websites that earn me a fantastic full time income.

Step 2: Choosing A Publishing Platform

Web hosting companies such as HostGator provided customers with great tools to create static websites, but the number of static websites created from time to time are drastically decreasing. Compared to static websites, content management platforms such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal has greater SEO flexibility.

If Internet marketing is in your mind, a content management system is your best choice.

Now the next big question is choosing the right CMS for you. While you can see many supporters for every publication platform, I prefer WordPress over others for its user friendliness.

Hosting companies like HostGator provides you automated WordPress installation programs such as Fantastico and WP installation is simply done with a press of a button.

WordPress also provide you

access to unlimited (OK that’s an exaggeration but you can’t finish trying every WP theme before you die) number of themes and great plug-ins for SEO.

Cost: WordPress is absolutely free! You can download it from the WordPress site (www.wordpress.org). Note that a self hosting version of WordPress has nothing to do with their publication platform www.wordpress.com. I can show you how to create a WordPress website from scratch and have it up and running within 5 minutes.

Step 3: Buying A Domain Name

Go Daddy is the most popular domain name registrar but domain names can be transferred from company to company so it’s not imperative to use their service.

As a beginner, you can look for cheap bargains offered by other registrars. There are some registrars that offer attractive pricing for the first year registration on domain names.

Domain extensions such as .net, .org., .in, .us and .co.au etc are usually cheap for the first year usage.

Many first-time businesses buy their domain names with business names but it’s a good idea to include some sub-domains that are keywords related to your business. It’s not necessary to buy them on the expensive .com extension but you can go for other extensions.

Cost: Typically as low as $1.99 for non .com domains and a maximum of $12.

Step 4: Themes For WordPress

If you are not planning to use a static website, you need to buy themes. There are hundreds of free themes for WordPress but if you’re looking for custom applications that an Internet marketer needs, you are well off with paid themes.

The advantage of premium WordPress themes: they are created with beginners in mind and technical knowledge is not necessary for operating them.

Some of these themes are known to provide unlimited number of customization options and various SEO tools to increase your online visibility.

For instance, if Google AdSense is in your mind, you should look for WordPress themes that support the same.

There are other things that provide excellent affiliate marketing support and it’s not uncommon to find themes that support all these features.

Cost: If bought separately, a theme pack can cost you as low as $17 to $300. In general the pricing for successful themes are above 50 but less than 100.

Conclusion:

These are the costs associated with starting a real website for your business but remember that pricing is just one aspect, not the sole determination factor, in starting a website.

You should make sure that you have done excellent research without fail as this will definitely result in the overall outcome of your project.

It’s a great idea going against the flow but this is challenging for newcomers. Instead of extra dimension but too many things at first, go for tried and tested methods as this will help you to save a lot of money.

In the long run, you can, however, choose different hosting plans and content management systems to come up with your own custom applications.

You have the option of hiring a developer to get your websites done but this method is not very efficient, especially if you are new to the world of web hosting.

Even if you manage to find a great developer, you may end up paying for unnecessary things but miss out on with the important stuff you needed on your website.

With careful planning, you can not only save a lot of money but can have a decent budget for marketing your website.