When starting a website, there are many decisions one must make in regards to both the design and the content. Who is going to design the site? Will it be you, a freelancer, or a professional corporation? As for the content, will you pay for someone to continually add content, or will you do it all yourself? After the website is built, will you be the one to promote and optimize it, or will that be outsourced as well? Obviously if you do it all yourself, the job will be much cheaper, although depending on your skills, you can probably end up with a higher quality site if you find professionals to do the work for you.

If you are starting an ecommerce site, you can save a lot of money by utilizing an open source platform, such as osCommerce. Not only are these kinds of applications free, but they are highly functional and come with a variety of options. In addition, you can find modifications for the software on the Internet, to further improve your website. Creating a website from scratch, whether you do it yourself or hire out, is either very time consuming or incredibly expensive.

Although design is important and you do not want something that looks generic, as long as you add some customization to a software supported site, you can still be unique. The back end of an ecommerce website is especially hard to code, and it can take weeks or months to perfect the code. It is simply much easier and economical to use what is already available, and the overall effect on sales will not be much different than if the site was fully customized.

Anyone will tell you that while designing the site seems like the hard part, the real challenges begin when you must start advertising the site, and bringing in visitors. There are millions of websites and billions of web pages on the Internet, so people are not going to magically flock to your site. You must offer quality content, either in the form of desired products or entertainment, and you must create a way for people to easily find you.

This can be achieved by regular advertisements, free publicity, or search engine optimization. While advertising is immediately cheaper, it only yields temporary results, while search engine optimization lasts for a long time and attracts higher quality visitors, as unlike advertising, these prospects are actively looking for you. Just like with the design of the site, you have to make the decision of whether to optimize yourself or have a company do it. For most people, the best route to take is a mix of do-it-yourself and professional assistance.

You would probably want help with directory submissions because doing those yourself is tedious and time consuming, while (depending on your skill level) you can handle keyword research and on page optimization yourself. It is not always necessary that you pay for help, and if you look in the right places, you can find people who are willing to give you advice for free. As always, you want to do as much as you can yourself to cut down on costs, but for the things that you absolutely cannot do alone, it is okay to get outside help.