As a website designer, this is often the first question that I am asked by a new client. The simple answer is that it costs whatever you are willing to spend; anywhere from free to millions of dollars. A more productive process to address the question of cost is to answer a series of questions.

What are your needs, goals and expectations?

What are the needs and expectations of your site visitors, customers and clients?

Is your business already established with a unique brand/identity?

What is required in terms of the skills, experience and level of design?

Do you want to hire a high profile design house, a medium sized design studio, a small company or a student?

What can you afford to budget for your project?

We’ll take a look at these questions to see how they influence the cost of creating a website, look at two simple examples and give you some ideas for coming up with a budget for your project. In general, the cost for a website will be based on how long it takes for design and implementation plus any additional costs required for hardware or waffleware. While there are certainly no hard and fast rules, the more experienced the design company, the higher their hourly rate. Generally, the more robust and complicated the site needs to be – whether for handling large amounts of traffic, for technically sophisticated programming and database integration or for specialized images and text – the higher the cost.

What are your needs, goals and expectations? What are the needs and expectations of your site visitors, customers and clients?

It’s important to address what your ideas are for a website and why you want one. There may also be details or uses that you haven’t considered. The needs and expectations of your target markets are also important and will also address your analysis of your competition. A good designer will support you through a process to determine what is required to achieve the results you require. PlanetLink often provides this as a consulting service with a portion of the fees applied towards the actual design work. Projects can also be implemented over time so that the costs can be spread out. The more involved the needs of the project, the greater the cost.

Is your business already established with its unique brand/identity?

Websites on a tight budget generally don’t address this issue. It’s important that your website accurately represent who you are from the perspective of “look and feel.” If the way your business is currently branded is effective, then the process of creating the imagery for your website will ideally be an extension of what already exists. If the budget allows, for businesses without a unique identity or style, often the generation of the website is an opportunity to create a new brand identity along with producing print materials at the same time, thus saving costs.

What is required in terms of the skills, experience and level of design? Do you want to hire a high profile design house, a medium sized design studio, a free-lance designer or a student? Will your project benefit from more advanced programming? Is it important to work with an experienced team that can understand your needs and help you to figure out what is best for you?

It’s vital consider your target audience. How do you serve them? What can you do within your website so that they see your business as being important to them? How are visitors going to be attracted to the site – both initial visits as well as repeat visits? How will your website structured to deliver intended results?

At PlanetLink we look at the process of website creation from three perspectives; artistic/creative, technical, and marketing. A good design company will have skills and expertise in those areas. In general, the more skilled and experienced the team, the higher their rates and the higher their minimum project fees. Some design firms don’t take on a project for less than $20,000. You will also find designers that will create your site on a per-page cost (okay for simple, low cost sites, but not recommended for anything beyond that). Someone who is just getting started in the business may also do your project for free just to get the experience.

What can you afford to budget for your project?

This is really an important question to ask yourself. What are your current expenditures for marketing? For sales? For support? What are your expectations/projections for revenue, or reduction of expenses from your website? What is the current annual revenue for your business? Your budget should, to a degree, be commensurate with the level at which your business is operating. If your website were for a large corporation, the budget would be higher than for a small sole proprietorship.

Let’s take a look at two examples:

A small business needs a website for their business so they have a presence on the Internet. The site is simple – about 5 pages with information about the business, the services they provide, and a form that can be submitted and the information received via email. The budget isn’t available for creating a graphic “look,” and existing images will be used. A smaller, less experienced designer may take a project like this for a few hundred dollars. A medium sized firm might quote $2000 to $4000 depending on variables. A larger firm would probably not take a project this small.

A mail order company wants to get into online sales. They currently have no website. They have a narrow mix of about 200 products with a broad target market; it’s also time to update their image. Depending on a wide range of variables, a project like this could start at about $7000 and go into six figures.

So back to our question, the cost for your website is determined to a large degree by what you can afford to spend. The complexity, size and needs play an important role as well as the level of expertise and experience of the design team. Generally, the more you spend on your website, the more website you will get for your money, an obvious statement but true none-the-less. In developing the budget for you project, remember to consider your needs and expectations, the level of design, size and complexity required for your project’s success.

Additionally an important component, beyond the scope of this article, addresses the promotion and marketing of your site – the best project in the world isn’t likely to be successful if no one knows about it. Be sure to consider and budget for the costs associated with your marketing and promotion program.

Steve Lillo is President of PlanetLink a website design and consulting firm which specializes in creating websites which get results. They also provide their Web Rx Service for assessing and increasing the effectiveness of existing websites. PlanetLink can be reached at www.planetlink.com.

Now that you have decided that it is time to create a website for your business there are many questions you must answer. One of the most important questions is “Who should create my website?”

I like to use the analogy of playing music; in as little as a few hours, some people can strum a few chords on the guitar and play a song. But to really play the instrument and make it sing requires experience, understanding and skill. Likewise, although there are tools which are readily available to assist in the process, effective website design requires experience and understanding of many diverse areas including: marketing, graphic design, search engine understanding, the differences and limitations of different browsers and computer platforms as well as knowledge of the waffleware and coding required to move beyond simple static html pages.

It is also vitally important that your designer understand you and your business and know how to most effectively communicate you to your internet audience. To answer our question, we’ll look at some important pieces of information that you’ll want to know before you choose your website designer.

What do you want in a website? What are your needs and intentions for having a website? Does the prospective designer listen to and understand your needs and intentions? Have you checked other similar businesses to see what they are doing on the Internet? Can a prospective designer offer any suggestions for improving upon what others have already accomplished? The more clarity you have about your intended results for having a website, the more accurately you can communicate your needs to your designer and the more likely it is that you will achieve these results.

Is the designer experienced in website design? How long has the designer been creating websites? What is their background? Ideally, your site designer has a variety of experience and expertise.

What are the designer’s strengths and weaknesses? The range of skills required for creating any type of website is more diverse than you can imagine; involving skills such as graphics and design, audio and video editing and production, marketing and programming.

Is the designer easy to work with and talk to? Is she/he able to communicate technical information so that you can understand it? The process of creating a website is sometimes an overwhelming process for some people. Consider hiring a designer with whom you have a good rapport and find communicating with easy.

Look at some of their previous clients sites. Do they all look the same? Do they load quickly? Are they easy to navigate through? Do you like their previous work? Do they accurately reflect their clients’ business? Does the designer custom create each site or would they have you select from a list of prepackaged sites? Can they program your site for you so that you can easily make edits on your own without needing their support?

What is your budget and what is the typical cost for the designer’s projects? As a generalization, the larger the company, the more they charge for their services (and often the more elaborate the sites they can create.) Companies which create sites from a prepackaged template often charge less but don’t provide you with custom solutions which more closely meet your needs. Site designers who are getting started will often create your site for a lower fee, essentially using your project to develop their skills.

Your decision should be based on many of these important questions. Also use any other questions you find useful when hiring any other service business for a project. Comparing website designers is sometimes like comparing bananas to bicycles – more complex than apples to oranges. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. You might consider writing pros and cons for each designer on a sheet of paper to develop a more objective point of view.

The selection of your website designer is an important step in the creation of a successful website. With time and patience, you too can join the millions of businesses with successful websites.

Steve Lillo is President of PlanetLink a website design and consulting firm which specializes in creating websites which get results. They also provide their Web Rx Service for assessing and increasing the effectiveness of existing websites. PlanetLink can be reached at www.planetlink.com.

Link building is a fairly time consuming task, and much of is spent in looking at various websites for links that could be linked back to your website. In fact, it’s possible to spend hours looking at search results for a site that links to sites similar to yours. However, there are some tips that can help speed up the search for sites to link to. The idea behind these tips is to maximize your results while minimizing your time and effort.

Google typically returns ten results per every page in a search. However, if you put in a search and then go up to the address bar and add “&num=100” at the end of the URL, you’ll get a Google search result page with 100 results listed instead of ten. This allows you to more quickly search the list of returned pages. You won’t have to click next over and over, and you can more easily compare

Don’t be afraid to use Boolean search functions. You may want to look for sites that are in the same field as your site and have a specific phrase or keyword in them. For this, use the AND operator. You can search for “London” AND “Angora sweaters” to find websites that sell angora sweaters in London. This allows you to quickly narrow down your search results to only those who fit your topic. You can use Boolean searches to search for specific keyword phrases or to eliminate specific keywords that continue to come up in searches.

It’s also possible to search by TLD domain type and by the page title. This also allows you to narrow down your search results. You can use this to search text in the page title and the domain. For example, if you only want to see .edu results that include specific keywords, you can use the “inurl” command.

Searching for links by using keywords is another option. You can use the “intitle” search command to see what pages use specific phrases and file extensions. Using this search, you can narrow down your search results to only .html pages that feature the term “SEO marketing.” You can even use this type of search structure to eliminate specific sites from your results page. All you need to do is add “-site:www.URL.com” at the end of the query.

These different search tips can help you quickly and easily get a list of URLs that may be perfect for link building. While you will still have to invest some time in your link building searches, you will be able to shift through sites much more quickly. By narrowing your search results down to only those that fit your criteria and then viewing more of them at once, you won’t spend as much time clicking through results. It may not seem like much, but cutting out even a few minutes from each search will save you a lot of time in the long run.

SEOSapien is a SEO Company. Find all our SEO Services starting at $500 and Search Engine Optimization Prices at http://www.seosapien.com.

In the past, web developers often had a choice: they could have a website that was fully search engine optimized and ranked near the top in search engine results, or they could have a site done in Flash that didn’t appear in search results at all. Why was this the case? Many old search engine robots were not able to read any keywords or even content used on a Flash site. However, new advances in search robots are changing this.

Search engine robots must crawl through a website and examine the contents, metadata, tags, ALT text, title text, and more to determine how relevant to certain topics the website is. With a Flash site, however, all these older robots saw was the code to load the Flash plug-in. They could not read any of the actual content. While there were some ways that got partially around this problem, Flash sites never ranked as high as non-Flash sites, even when the Flash site was more relevant.

One thing that is changing this is the creation of Adobe Flash Player. Adobe Systems is actively working with search engines like Yahoo and Google to integrate Flash Player with their search engines. Once a business or individual submits their Flash site to the search engine, it will be ranked more or less where it would be if it were a non-Flash site. This allows search engines to rank fully dynamic websites better.

Google is already using Flash Player to rank Flash sites, and they have even been working to fine-tune the program to index content found in various Flash banners, buttons, and other parts of a Flash site. Their new search engine robot can store text found in these files and read them like it would read a standard HTML text, giving the site more content on which to be evaluated and ranked in search results. Google will read and index Flash files automatically once the content is added to your website. There’s nothing special you have to do.

However, Google still cannot read images that include text, nor does it read and index FLV files (the main type of file used for videos on sites like YouTube). These files do not contain any true text elements, and therefore have nothing for a search engine robot to “read.” Google’s search robots also can’t read some types of Java. If your website loads your Flash through a Java Script, for example, the Flash files may not be read due to the robot’s inability to handle Java.

Google may also not index any file within the Flash file that is considered an external resource. If the Flash file has an embedded SWF, XML, or HTML file, they will all be indexed separately, not as part of the Flash file. On the other hand, if the Flash file is contained within an HTML page, the entire page will be treated as one page, and the Flash file will be treated as a part of that page.

The final consideration regarding search engines and Flash is that most search bots have some difficulty handling Flash text that is written in a language that is bidirectional, like Hebrew.

SEOSapien is a SEO Company. Find all our SEO Services starting at $500 and Search Engine Optimization Prices at http://www.seosapien.com.

When it comes to doing SEO for your website, one of the major concerns you may have is how much time and money you’ll need to spend on it. If you’re hiring an SEO firm, then time IS money, and you’ll want to know a rough estimate of how much time the SEO firm will put in and, therefore, charge you for.

You can break down the steps necessary for SEO work, making it easier to judge how much time you or your SEO company will need to spend on each. The estimates given here do not take into account any major issues or technical problems that may arise. You may want to add in a few extra hours to each step to account for any problems that you may have to deal with. If your website is exceptionally large (a thousand pages or more), you may also want to add more time into your estimate.

Step 1: Domain/URL Issues – Two hours to a day

The first thing to do is to go through your website manually and make certain that everything is consistent. You also want to look for things that will cause a search engine robot to have difficulty navigating through your site. If you have a large, dynamic site or a site that brings in a lot of content from other sites that may change often, it may take you more than a couple of hours for this step. Once you’ve completed this step, expect it to take two to four more hours to create and test all of your 301-redirect links. It may also take between two and fifteen hours to rename or re-code any filenames depending on how your site is assessed.

Step 2: – Design issues – two to four hours plus 30 minutes per page

It’s easy to see many design issues, but it can be difficult to make certain that your design is consistent from page to page across your entire website. It may take a few hours to note down every design issue, but it shouldn’t take more than four or five hours. You can often note down these issues while you’re doing your domain/URL assessment, saving a bit of time. How long it takes to implement all of the changes you need to make at this step depends on how many pages you have. At most, you may end up spending half an hour on each page. If you’ve got a huge site, this can add days to your SEO.

Step 3: – Architectural Issues – 125 hours

The most important aspect of your webpage to a search engine is its architecture. While building a list of your architectural concerns can be done while making your other lists, the actual implementation of these changes may take days or weeks. Much of this depends on how dynamic your site is and just how much re-coding is necessary.

Step 4: – Content – half an hour / 250 words

Creating content that is search engine optimized can take a good amount of time, especially if you have a lot of content on your site. One way to save time and money on this step is to do the writing yourself; however, before you jump on that idea, make certain you understand how SEO works. Otherwise, you may do more harm that good. You can also purchase licensed content or rewrite your own content to include keywords.

SEOSapien is a SEO Company. Find all our SEO Services starting at $500 and Search Engine Optimization Prices at http://www.seosapien.com.