WEBSITES How are they done?

I do a bit of webdesign for very very reasonable rates if anyone is interested.

Compare website building to carpet cleaning. Anybody can rent a Rug Doctor, but if you truly want something done right you hire someone with the experience and tools.

Anybody can build a website cheaply, but will it bring in new customers? Will it look professional and rank high with Google and Yahoo?

If you want to do it yourself and make it work:

Hostgator.com - $70 per year
Wordpress - Free
Good Wordpress Theme - $100
Adobe Photoshop - $500 +
Adobe Illustrator - $400 +
Good Link Building Network - $100 + per month
$$$$ - Classes, Books and 100s hours of experimenting and learning.

The building of the site and getting the site ranked is the EASY part.  The hard part is the ongoing promotion that is needed to keep your site relevant and fresh.  Your site is useless if it is not delivering you more customers every month.  Increasing the amount of actual customer calls on a monthly basis is where you see the real return on your investment.  If you receive 20 customer calls one month and you are not seeing exponentially more the following month and so on, your site (or provider) is not doing it's job.  Stagnate production is the death of most businesses.  The goal of any good site (or provider) should be to be greedy and grab all the business out there.  My two cents anyway!!!

Microsoft Office Live is great!  A very inexpensive way to get started.

A website shouldn't be that expensive.. We got ours done for under $1500. I believe that a quality site is very important. Ease of navigation too. I'm emergency service, so we just want our phone # big and in front.. Along with info if the consumer wants to research.. When hiring someone, makesure they will do SEO for you while they are at it.. Don't go with a cheap designer that the search engines wont see because of poor coding.

Never skimp on quality when it comes to your website, it is the most important advertising tool you can utilise. If you skimp on the quality now, then try and improve later that is all good, but you've lost yourself valuable SERP climbing time. I realise this is an old post but hopefully that helps.

Also, JCarpet33, would you care to share any more information on the $100+ p/mo of link building network? Either here or by PM?

I made my own small homepage using an wysiwyg editor my web host offers. I'm not programmer but this kind of editor is easy to use. I would love to learn html soon but I have no time at the moment :/