Truism number One: Nothing is free! That includes building a web site. You get what you pay for! That is truism number two. It applies to web sites just as it does to everything else. This discussion will cover the range of options from building a web presence yourself to having it professionally done.

     Its tempting to look at building your own site as being free. It can't be! Writing html from scratch is a naively inappropriate idea. At the very least you will need some sort of shareware web authoring tool and an image manipulation application. There are free html editors. (We've even used them.) To the best of our knowledge there is no free, sophisticated software to work with imagery.

     For the sake of argument lets grant that you can find free software. You have spent considerable time and effort tracking down the apps, installing and figuring out how they work, and thats just the basics. Unless you value your time at zip you are starting to accumulate costs for your free web site. So much for free.

     Realistically, if you are going to create a web site you will have to cough up some cash for an html editor. The cheapest and easiest to use are WYSIWYGs at about $100. Assuming as we did before that your time is worth zip the learning curve will cost nothing so we have only invested $100 so far.

     Imagery is absolutely critical for almost any web site. You don't necessarily have to be a graphics wizard but to build a commercial web site you will almost certainly have to do some image manipulation. Count on $100 or more for an application to crop images, adjust colors and make navigation buttons. Still assuming your time is worth zip ( a very bad assumption, by the way) you are now up to $200 while you climb the learning curve to get your site started.

     As you approach the $200 threshold a number of web based tools become available. Or at least, seem to. A number of companies offer on-line web site builders if you sign up for hosting programs. Ranging from $200 to $500 these may be a better approach if you really must build it yourself. The biggest real feature these applications seem to offer is the resulting web site will have complete navigation systems. All too many amateur sites have dead end internal links.

     Web Marketing Technologies has tested several of these on-line site builders. Having all your materials at hand, both text and graphics, seems to be a key element in success. These systems probably work pretty well if you don't mind your site looking exactly like however many other sites have been built using that tool. If your business is just like your competitors this may be a good thing. Only you can decide that.

     Remember, these are do-it-yourself, template based web sites. There is very little room for creativity. Some of them do have some pretty nifty little add-ons but you pay dearly for the extras. If you stick with the basics you can keep within that two to five hundred dollar window, but the slick little "extras" add up fast. And do-it-yourself means learn as you go and go it alone. You will get very little help and even less sympathy.

     If you do get the site built at anything close to your original budget and without swearing off the Internet entirely all maintenance is up to you. It is unclear to us how you might go about updating your site so we will just leave it for now. We have heard one horror story of a gentleman that has been trying to correct some inaccurate information on his site for over seven months. He even has an attorney involved and for some reason no one seems able to do anything. The original site cost him less than a thousand dollars so we guess he got a good deal and saved plenty of money. (He can use his savings to pay the attorney.)

     Hiring professionals, such as Web Marketing Technologies, to create your web site is not just about saving money. Its about investing precious resources wisely. In the long run you may save money and you will certainly get a far better value. Your web site will be your business' first impression. With today's sophisticated customer you are better off with no web site than a poorly presented one.

     There is also a hybrid in which you hire a company to build your site from a set of templates. They may or may not present their wares as templates but if you look at their portfolio the cookie cutter approach is often apparent. These outfits can indeed turn out some very attractive sites. Although they change the color scheme, text and graphics from site to site you know you have seen them over and over again.

     Your web site is the face of your business that the Internet sees. You want it to stand out above the crowd and make a positive impression, not just be another, like all the rest.

     Web Marketing Technologies addresses each web site as a unique, new marketing campaign. When your prospective client arrives at a Web Marketing Technologies created site they know immediately that they have found what they have been looking for - Your business! Web Marketing Technologies will help you transform web site costs into a solid investment in Internet marketing.