Websites and an Internet presence are an inexpensive way to advertise and tell the world about your business. There are 5 potential costs associated with developing and maintaning your website.  We will try to clearly explain each in this message.  When you are done, you can investigate the cost of you own website at Estimate Your Cost.

Domain Name Registration - The domain name is the name by which you are found on the Internet, such as d2-webdesign.com.  You must register your domain name annually (or for several years at a time) in order to own and use that domain name.  There is a small fee associated with domain registration, typically in the order of $10/year. 

Site Design and Development - Design and development is the labor cost to create your website initially, i.e. the cost of developing artwork, creating menus and navigation links, constructing the actual pages, setting up the host account, linking the domain name to it, adding the content to each page, creating and testing submission forms, etc.  

For a complex site, this may also involve a creating database on the remost host sever and linking it to the pages of your website, so that you can store information in that data base, and you and your users/customers can retrieve information from that database.

These costs may range from a few hundred dollars for a simple site to a few thousand for a more complex one.

Hosting - The files that make up your website must reside somewhere where people can find them.  This is accomplished by renting space on a high-speed server with a very high-speed connection to the Internet.  Your account on this server is known as a host account.  Hosting can cost as little as $5/month, but can be much more depending on your specific requirements.

Maintenance - The cost of maintaining a website is design and development labor that goes on after your site is up and running. In general, this is not as big an expense as people think it is.  Updating text on a website once a month never costs more than a few dollars. 

There is a trade-off between initial design and development and ongoing maintenance - in other words, if you want to minimize your maintenance costs, you may want to spend a little extra in the beginning to facilitate updates.  (The website you are now reading was build using blog technology.  It costs a little more to set up initially, since it stores all of its content in a database. However, maintenance is minimized, because you can do most of it yourself.

Advertising and Visibilty - This is whatever costs you incur bringing traffic to your website.  Most people believe that the Internet is basically free and are a little bit offended by the idea of having to pay for visitors to their website. There are many ways to get more traffic, but all the most effective ways cost money.  Google and Yahoo have both become huge corporations as testiment to this fact.   If you want serious results from your website, you need to consider spending some money to promote it.  To give you a ballpark figure, you might spent 40 cents for each new visitor to your site. And if 1 out of 20 becomes a customer, that’s $8 you would be paying for each new customer.