re: Building a Website Advice

Yeah. Man. Focus on your product, whatever it is. Don't sink a lot of upfront money in something like a website. Just make sure you thoroughly understand the future portability of it. You're looking to do ecommerce so you're probably needing a database for customer login, addresses, etc. Make sure everything is portable. Meaning you own your database and it's on a standard database platform and not something that's proprietary to the host.

Having said that $8k is not expensive and I would actually question the quality at that price point.

So say the business takes off and appears to be sustainable, in a couple of years you can do a cost benefit analysis of keeping the design/hosting, or switching to lower cost straight hosting and pay a developer to build a new site, or transfer your existing one.

Anyway, just my .02.