re: Building a Website Advice

Pretty much anyone can build a professional looking website these days. There are a number of online sites that make it really simple to design a good looking site by using basic drag and drop tools. These are cheap and easy.

But what you need to determine is, how locked in do you want to be with a particular build/host company. Some allow your site to be portable, meaning you can move it to a different host if you want (I think this is compatibility dependent), with others, you are pretty locked in to using their hosting.

Here is a link with comparisons of the major vendors. LINK

How complex is the site going to be? Are you planning to do e-commerce? Message board? Blog? These features will be harder to move later than just a website with text and pictures.

At a minimum, you should make sure that you OWN your domain name. OWN means you can move it to a different registrar at your leisure (it's not really that simple to do, but it's important if you ever decide to shop elsewhere for hosting). In fact, I would probably not buy the domain name through the hosting/design company. You can get them cheap on GoDaddy and that way you know that you own it outright.

If you are just starting out, I would check out the companies at the link above and see if any of them have packages that accomplish what you want at a reasonable price and go with them. Just keep in mind the possible portability issues. Down the road, if your business takes off, you can look into paying for a programmer/custom web designer, moving to either your own servers or a straight hosting company (as in not hosting/design), etc.