Compared to most other forms of business or personal marketing, a Web site is very inexpensive. Like all other types of marketing you tend to have more than one type of expense to add to your budget. In the case of a Web site, there is a minimum of three types of expenses accrued: creation, hosting and maintenance.

Web Site Creation

As is the case with all other marketing types, you will need to pay to have your Web site created, unless you can do it yourself. This creation cost can be as low as a few hundred dollars or soar into the thousands. A simple business-card style Web site contains just enough information about you or your company to give potential clients a means to contact you. These sites can often be created using free or low cost third party tools. You will quite often settle for using the preconfigured graphics and templates that the site construction agency provides you. While limiting your expense, this also limits the appearance of your professionalism. Anyone that spends a lot of time on the Internet can easily spot a cookie-cutter Web site, so although they may be a great way to get your site online, they aren’t a very good means of creating a permanent Web presence. So even if you are using a free or low cost site creation software, if at all possible, spend a few hundred more dollars to have professional graphics created for your site. It will definitely pay for itself in the long run.

The larger and more complex your site becomes, the more you will find a need to have a professional join your team. A web site can become a full time job in some larger companies, or even require a full time team for companies as large as Microsoft or Hewlett Packard. If you are planning on your site growing from something that you can do yourself, into something that will require the services of a developer, you need to make sure that you start working with a professional early. Otherwise, much of the work that you have done to get started, will be wasted. That wasted work, becomes wasted money.

Web Site Hosting

The second cost for your Web site is hosting. There are a variety of sources that you can host your Web site with, to keep it available and online 24 hours a day all year long. These sources can range from $6 or $7 a month for small sites, to a few thousand for elaborate sites running Microsoft SharePoint or advanced programming solutions.

Web Site Maintenance

The third cost for your Web site is maintenance. Regular maintenance ensures that your site stays current, that links aren’t broken and assists in maintaining a good standing within the search engines. The amount of maintenance that your site requires is based on the activity of your company, and the goals you have set out in your Marketing plan. Depending upon the platform your site is developed on, you may be able to do much of the maintenance yourself. In the case of blog posts, you can set up a team of approved staff that is required to post one blog article each month. Or have the employee in charge of marketing and public relations post a minimum of three news releases every month. By taking on some of the site maintenance yourself, you can lower the maintenance costs and reserve your hired professional for more complex site changes.

Laying out the Budget

Although these figures are very rough, and dependent on a variety of factor including the rate at which your developer works, and the per hour cost or per job cost that they typically charge, I thought it might help you with determining how you want to get started with your Web site. Keep in mind that a good developer will be willing to work with you. They will be able to implement a CMS for a business card site, so that you can keep down your content creation costs for the kickoff of the site. If you do choose to go with this hybrid solution, be sure to talk to your developer about how you can ensure that what you are building today, can easily be expanded to meet your future needs. This is where a well thought out Marketing Plan can be a life saver.
Business Card SMB Web Site with a Developer (First Year)
A standard business card web site typically has three pages including a home page / introduction, contact information page and a products / services page with minimal written content, graphics and cross linked content.

Small Full Service SMB Web Site with a Developer (First Year)
A small full service web site typically includes a variety of pages that provide in depth details of each service or product offered, a history of the company, a portfolio of previous clients, a shopping cart for physical goods or downloadable software and can be built upon a variety of platforms such as shopping cart software, a content management system or even on separately created HTML pages. We will assume that this is a store with ten large product descriptions and a full store built upon a CMS system. Using a CMS system dramatically reduces the time investment in creating a site.