by W Thomas Payne

Created on: February 27, 2008

Developing and maintaining a web site for a new business requires focus, determination and a plan. With a limited or nearly non-existent budget, a new business can still develop a web site that is both professional in appearance and easy to update for under $500.

Step One Pull out your business plan and review it. Gather the key attractions of your business, and put them in bullet points. Each bullet point is going to become a separate page on your web site.

Step Two Find a low-cost hosting company that supports php and MySQL. There are hosting packages out there for sites with low traffic that cost under $50. Words are low traffic graphics are not.

Step Three Determine your real need for graphics. Graphics drive up the amount of traffic your host company will be "serving up" to the outside world and drive up the cost of the package. The only critical graphic is your logo, since your web site is a marketing tool and it needs to be consistent with your business card, signs, etc. Small pictures of examples of your work are a good idea, and with a free graphic editing package such as Irfanview, you can compress the file size to something usable.

Step Four Find a content management system (CMS) that you are comfortable with learning. There are several free, or low cost alternatives, such as Drupal, Joombla, phpNuke, and WordPress out there that serve quite adequately, and are relatively simple to learn for a basic web site. ALL of these packages rely on php (a programming language) and MySQL (a database structuring system).

Step Five Study your business plan and marketing materials. Identify the key words that describe your company.

Step Six Create 300 to 500 mini-articles and associate them with a bullet point from Step One. Create a separate page, in a simple text file. Make sure 2 or 3 key words or their synonyms appear in every paragraph. Include your company name in the first paragraph of every page.

Step Seven Load up the CMS you have chosen. In most cases, your host will have several of them ready with a pre-installation package available, so you only have to fill in a few blanks on the control panel, and hit a button.

Step Eight Configure your CMS with your appropriate log-in and password information and GIVE A COPY TO SOMEONE YOU TRUST. Write it down, and put that information in a safe place, too. If you lose it, odds are that the low cost host company will NOT be able, or willing, to retrieve this for you.

Step Nine Create new pages using the CMS. You do this by copying and pasting the information from Step Six into the template.

Step Ten Hire an expert in the CMS you chose or php to edit the "style sheet" for your web site to match your company's image. For an expert, this is a two or three hour project, at $50 to $100 an hour.

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