It can cost you heavily to have a top quality website built for you, paying out several hundreds or even thousands of dollars. You still might not be guaranteed you'll get what you want.
1 It can be a rip-off. No doubt you've seen ads in magazines where companies are charging hundreds of dollars for a simple website with, say, five pages. They may be a physical business which has overheads to account for, such as office space. In any case, it's a risk using one unseen and you're better at least following a personal recommendation.
Even then, you'll be dealing with coders, not internet marketers. So, unless you can describe in exact detail what you want, you may have problems. They will probably not adjust their coding themselves to fit the internet marketing purpose of the site.
2 Freelance. Another option is to finder a coder on a place like elance. These can be cheaper because they don't have the overheads but can work to just the same quality as the more expensive larger companies.
However, the same reservations as above, about coders and internet marketing, apply. You're best testing a coder out with a smaller project first to see how they do in terms of following your specifications, not needing to keep coming back to you, and timing. You could test out a few and choose the best one.
3 Do it yourself. If you only want a simple five page site you can work on it yourself. You could do it for free by downloading a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor like Kompozer. Or you could invest in a program like XSitePro which helps you build multi-page sites as well as single sales pages.
There is a learning curve but you are in control of the process yourself and one payment covers as many sites as you want to make. Once you know how, without using any coding, you can repeat it again and again.
1 It can be a rip-off. No doubt you've seen ads in magazines where companies are charging hundreds of dollars for a simple website with, say, five pages. They may be a physical business which has overheads to account for, such as office space. In any case, it's a risk using one unseen and you're better at least following a personal recommendation.
Even then, you'll be dealing with coders, not internet marketers. So, unless you can describe in exact detail what you want, you may have problems. They will probably not adjust their coding themselves to fit the internet marketing purpose of the site.
2 Freelance. Another option is to finder a coder on a place like elance. These can be cheaper because they don't have the overheads but can work to just the same quality as the more expensive larger companies.
However, the same reservations as above, about coders and internet marketing, apply. You're best testing a coder out with a smaller project first to see how they do in terms of following your specifications, not needing to keep coming back to you, and timing. You could test out a few and choose the best one.
3 Do it yourself. If you only want a simple five page site you can work on it yourself. You could do it for free by downloading a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor like Kompozer. Or you could invest in a program like XSitePro which helps you build multi-page sites as well as single sales pages.
There is a learning curve but you are in control of the process yourself and one payment covers as many sites as you want to make. Once you know how, without using any coding, you can repeat it again and again.