It is a nature for small business to have a limited capital to invest on a website. In this article we are sharing with you three simple tips that we wish could help small businesses to own a website.

Hosting and Domain

We often asked which hosting (storage space) and domain (www.yourdomain.com) provider is better? Below are few tips on buying them:

• General price for a domain is about $10 a year (.com) and hosting is about ($8 monthly). However, we recommend you to ask your web designer and/or developer because they could have a list of reliable domain and hosting provider. Further more, they might have a discounted price on hosting and domain.

• You don’t need unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth for your hosting account.

Personally, we have been working with WP WebHost (Use RAFIEWP30 for 30% off ) and it has been working very well. Read more about their FAQs.

Content Management System (CMS)

CMS is a platform that you can use to manage your website without prior knowledge of programming codes. Below are list of popular and reliable CMS:

• WordPress (Highly recommended)
• Joomla
• Drupal

Back to the point above (hosting and domain), some of the service provider supports WordPress platform – which means if you have any issues regarding the platform, the domain and hosting provider will help you with no extra cost.

WordPress

From the previous article we wrote about why WordPress is our all-time favourite platform, other benefits that you could gain when using WordPress are:

• It is famous for its “five-minute install”.
• “WordPress take care of 80-90% of the website SEO.” – Matt Cutts on WordCamp San Francisco 2009.
• 11 reasons why WordPress makes other platforms jealous. (Must Read)

Above all, it is free and could be easily customize to your business. More than 5 million websites being powered by WordPress, you can’t be wrong. We promise!

Hiring Web Designer

Hiring web designer is as important as the decision to own a website on the first place. Web designers will be the one who will determine the visual appearance of your coming website. Some of them also could develop a website based on your selected CMS platform. Below are few tips that you should know before hiring a designer:

• They have a good portfolio.
• They should give you a reasonable quote based on your website requirement.
• You are eligible for at least two design options/drafts without deposit.
• They should carry out a research about your company/products.
• They should keep you up-to-date and set up a deadline for the project completion.

Above all, they should inspire you to have a website. Then you have found a good web designer and ready for a take off!

Photo (Above)

For more info, you could read the article written by Bram on FreelanceSwitch, Six Tips for Choosing the Right Freelancer/Designer. And finally, we would leave you to this quote:

The amount of money that you invested for your website depends the significance of your website to your business.