What does it cost to get online?

There are five basic costs.

1. domain name registration
2. design and development
3. hosting
4. promotion
5. maintenance

Domain name registration

You must register a domain name for your business. The name must comply with certain rules. It will cost about $120 for a "www.yourbusiness.com" name for two years.

A well-chosen domain name can help customer recognition and increase traffic. It is increasingly more difficult to acquire a catchy domain name so a little imagination is required and certain restrictions on names apply, particularly to the ".co.uk" and ".com" domains. Clara Hosts can register your name or you can do it yourself.

Design and development

Generally a small business website will cost between $A800 and $A5000. In a nutshell, you are paying for the time involved in building the site and the level of expertise required to make it work. A four page site with graphics and text supplied by the client will cost about $800 and a site which needs photography, artwork, some flash animation and more complex programming could cost up to $5000.

Options to achieve your site objectives are discussed in our initial consultation so you can choose the most cost effective method to suit your business. We give a fixed quote with clear design objectives agreed upon at the beginning of the project.

Web hosting

Most small business website hosting requirements fit into the $A110 to $A650 per year price bracket depending on the size and technology required for your site.

Promotion

Search engine placement is crucial to the success of your website. Clara Hosts will optimise your web pages to gain excellent position in the search engine indexes. We make careful submissions to the major search engines for free as part of our service and mass submit to many of the lesser-known search engines.

When planning dates for your website to go online, you need to consider that it takes a couple of months to be placed on some of the search engines. Traffic to your site will increase as your site gets listed and other methods of promotion are utilised. We can discuss further options to increase traffic to your site as on ongoing service.

Maintenance

The Internet is a dynamic environment and stale web sites just get passed over. Your site needs to change regularly to keep visitors coming back. Four options are:

1. Update the site yourself with the right software and a little training.
2. We build a database driven site where you can edit your own content.
3. We perform any changes based on an hourly rate ($50/hr).
4. Use our proven content management system where changing content is as easy as changing text on a word processor.