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.

I will share that three quotes that I recently received to build my website ranged anywhere from $6K all the way up to $28K.

All three companies were given the same exact information to bid on.

I got a minimum $8k quote. I thought that was ridiculous.

8k is cheap for a built from scratch e commerce platform.

Honestly if you are going cheap, take my advice and go prebuilt from squarespace or woo. Otherwise you are going to over pay for a fairly crappy website.

I've had to look around to build a new site myself recently-- just to build a basic information based site though, not a e-commerce site like you.

I heard good things about Wix, but my understanding is that if you buy from Wix or most similar platforms, you are also locked into hosting there. Since I'd already bought my domain through hostgator (2 yr package) and set up my business emails there, it didn't seem a good fit.

One option similar to Wix that did catch my eye is MotoCMS. Here's a link to their eCommerce templates:

motocms

Haven't really looked through these specfically (again, I wasn't looking to build an estore), but the aesthetic quality of their basic informational type websites is a bit better than average compared to the other template based sites I looked through and I found one I really liked.

They primarily recommend hosting with inmotion (which from what I've seen gets pretty good reviews, generally better than godaddy, 1&1, etc.) and bluehost, but you should be able to port your completed site to other host providers as long as they meet the requirements of motocms... this is actually the sticking point that prevented me from pulling the trigger... One of the requirements is the host provider use "Zend Guard Loader". Hostgator uses Zend, but not on my hosting package. I asked hostgator tech support if it would work, and they said if I could download the site and upload it into hostgator they "should" be able to make it work. I asked Motocms to confirm, and they said, "tell you what, we can just give you a coupon to get a year of free hosting at inmotion."

I've been too busy since then to follow up or do anything, so I'm still not sure how this would play out. My point of the above tldr paragraph is to let you know the only potential sticking point I found from motocms being a slam dunk, and it may or may not have been a true problem. I still don't know. Otherwise, I did the free trial with their builder and it was easy (I have no experience). So, for ballpark $200-$300, it might be worth looking into. And I think some of the basic non ecommerce websites also have an add on line item of approx $60 to add an "ecommerce plugin" whatever that specifically is.

Best of luck.