One of the most effective ways your small business can spend its money is on a web site. Such a site can be inexpensive but at the same time it can supplement other promotional material to make possible a product presentation which previously was only possible with expensive colour brochures. Such a site is not only aimed at new potential customers but also at existing customers, employees and suppliers. It is one of the faces you present to your market.
First, you will need to get your own site rather than go on someone else's grouped site. This means that you will have to register a domain name with Internic for a ".com" name (US $100.00 for two years) or register a ".ca" name for free. Internic will register any name that is not already in use while the Canadian authority will insist that you use your company name with the province before the ".ca". This registration is necessary because you will own your domain name, your URL and e-mail address and can move from supplier to supplier without changing them. You will, after all, become well known with potential customers bookmarking your URL and keeping your e-mail address and all these people will lose track of you if your ISP goes out of business and your URL and e-mail are tied to him.
Secondly, you will need a host for your site. Prices for this service have come down to about 25% of what they were only a year ago and you can rent space for a basic small site for around US $100.00 per year. Get a basic site with a host which has more advanced sites available and move up as you learn how to manage your site.
Finally you will have to create your material. Paying someone to do this well is expensive and you will have to keep paying because your site needs to be continuously up-dated. Alternatively you can do it in-house. Learning HTML or learning to use a program which does it for you is not difficult and it does give you good control of your material. Note that if you have a colour printer and make the web pages fit paper pages, you can print out your web pages and use them as hand-outs. The advantage here is that you create your material only once and have a uniform look.
For more information on web page hosts try budgetweb.com. For HTML information go to this introduction .
