How to Build a Really Good Website for Under $100

Author: Jim Personius, SmallBiz123.com

Every business needs a website; at least for the basic purposes of credibility. A nice website reinforces your commitment to the business and allows customers, vendors, business partners, referral sources, and potential employees to learn more about you. A good website makes your business look more professional. As an added bonus, having your own email address looks a lot more permanent and professional than generic email addresses from AOL, Comcast, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and the like.

“I cannot afford a website,” you say. “We’re just starting up. The economy is down and money is tight.” Well, print this article, follow the detailed steps, and you can build a really good website for well under $100—and you can do it in just a few hours over a few days. You do not need special technical skills; you do not need to hire anyone.

What costs are involved exactly? You need:

• An Internet domain name (otherwise known as URL, website address, dot com name, etc.). There are many places that sell names on the Internet, such as ICDsoft, Network Solutions, GoDaddy, and many others. We recommend our affiliate partner, ICDsoft (more later). Registering a domain name takes a few minutes and will cost $5-15 or so.
• An Internet hosting service. This is a company that hosts your website on their servers. They connect your website with the Internet. A good hosting company will provide technical support services, site statistics, backup services, security, email servers, database software, subdomain support, and plenty of disk space. Typical basic hosting plans run from $6-20 per month. Most of the companies that sell domain names will be glad to host your website for you.

We recommend and use ICDsoft.com because of the quality of their service and their low price. A domain name and one year of basic hosting costs $77 at ICDsoft.com. The $77 is broken down to $5 for the name registration and $6 per month for hosting. Click (>>save-10%-here<<) and you can save 10% on your ICDsoft.com registration and hosting. So, for about $70, you can have your own really good website and unlimited email addresses for a year—a tremendous bargain! All the rest of the necessary software that you need to build your really good website is free.

Note that this is not an e-commerce website for under $100. If you want to sell products over the Internet, have a product database, have a shopping cart, take credit cards and other payments, then you need a different structure than we discuss here. You can still buy your domain and hosting from the same companies, but you probably do need some professional help to select, set-up, and integrate the shopping cart, product database, payment systems, and security architecture.

Are you ready? Let’s get started…

Set up the Website

( 1 ) Get a website name and hosting service. For US businesses, we prefer and recommend a “.com” name because people really don’t expect or remember other extensions. The domain name companies can tell you what names are available and which are already taken. Some sites even suggest names based on the words you enter. We think it is best and easiest to buy the domain name and hosting from the same company. You can buy them from separate places with some extra work/hassle to transfer the name and DNS to new host service.

( 2 ) You will receive an email(s) from your domain registration and hosting companies confirming that you own the domain name. It should also tell you the address to get to the administrator’s screen (control panel) and provide the user name and password. Log into your control panel to verify the set up. Sometimes it takes a few hours after your domain name purchase to get access.

( 3 ) Create a new email account inside your new domain name for yourself. You will need this later. It’s best to have at least one admin email for your website account. At ICDsoft, click Mail Manager from the Control Panel. Create a new email account by entering the name and password. Write down your new email address and password for later use.

( 4 ) Create a MySQL database. Your hosting company should support MySQL5 and have explicit directions. At ICDsoft, it’s pretty easy.

• Click on My SQL Databases from the Control Panel.
• Name your database (example: website_wpsite) and press CREATE.
• Create a user name and password for your database. Grant all the possible privileges to your new user name (the default privileges).
• Write down your database name, user name, and password; you will need this later.
• Enable the remote connection for your user name.
• Look for a local host address on the page (example: localhost:/tmp/mysql5.sock or similar). Write this down in your notes.

( 5 ) Go to WordPress.org and click Download WordPress from the front page. This will download WordPress-9.9.9.zip to your computer (where 9.9.9 will be the actual numbers of the current WordPress version). Unzip the WordPress-9.9.9.zip folder on your computer. WordPress is free—another tremendous value!

( 6 ) Upload the WordPress software to your hosted web server. Expert webmasters can load WordPress directly to the server and unzip it using ZipDeploy. However, since you are ready this article, we will assume you want to use the slower, more straightforward novice approach. If you are comfortable with an automated solution, use that; it will save you several hours.

• Using the File Manager on the  website’s Control Panel, recreate the directory structure on the server that you see in the unzipped WordPress folder you created on your computer. For example, in the main www directory, create three folders (wp-admin, wp-content, and wp-includes). Then under each folder, create new folders that map according to the WordPress structure. Continue until you have created all the WordPress folders in the proper location. Warning, when creating the folder structure, some folder names are capitalized; create new folders exactly as WordPress has named them. Double-check the folder structure carefully to ensure its accuracy and eliminate the chance for difficult errors later.
• Using the “Multi” upload file function in the File Manager, upload the files from WordPress on your computer into the proper associated folders on the server. On ICDSoft, you are limited to 10 files at one time. This can take a while as there are many files to upload. Be careful to upload every file to its proper folder on the Internet server. Once again, double-check to make sure all the right files are in all the right places.

( 7 ) After you have uploaded the WordPress software to the server and double-checked it for accuracy and completeness, open a new browser window. Then type your website name on the browser address line and go to your website. If your WordPress is correct, you will see a message saying that you are missing the wp-config.php file. That is Ok. Click the “Create a Configuration File” button.

( 8 ) Grab your notes from the earlier MySQL database set up steps. Click the “Let’s Go” button.

( 9 ) At the configuration screen (with five partially filled boxes):

• Enter Database Name (example: website_wpsite). Use the same MySQL database name you created earlier.
• At User Name, enter the same MySQL user name you created earlier. Remember capitalization is significant.
• At Password, enter the same MySQL password you created earlier.
• Try leaving “localhost” in the Database Host box.
• Leave “wp_” in the Table Prefix box.
• Click Submit.

( 10 ) If the configuration worked (you will see “All Right Sparky!”), you are in good shape and ready to continue. If not, you will get an error message. Most likely, your error is caused by one of these factors:

• User name or password is not correct.
• You may need to revise the Database Host field. Enter the localhost address that you wrote down earlier (localhost:/tmp/mysql5.sock or similar).
• You are missing some WordPress files on the server. Compare the server files with the WordPress files on your computer.
• Correct your errors and try again.

( 11 ) You are doing great. Click “Run the Install.”

( 12 ) At the Welcome Page:

• Enter the title of your website. You can change this later but enter the website name or short description here.
• Enter the new website email address that you created earlier.
• Check the box to let your website appear on search engines so other people can find you.
• Click “Install WordPress.”

( 13 ) Success! Now, you are ready to set up your website. But first, write down your WordPress User Name (admin) and your WordPress Password (random characters). Click “Log In.”

( 14 ) At the WordPress login page, create a Bookmark or Add to Favorites, so you can easily come to this page whenever you want to adjust your website.

( 15 ) Enter your WordPress User Name and Password. You may want to check the Remember Me box. WordPress will immediately give you an option to change the randomly generated password to something you can remember better.

Build the Website Content

WordPress is the content management and presentation software for your website. It was designed to support blogs, but is very useful and powerful for basic websites as well.

WordPress comes with a default theme and another theme on the side. Themes define the look and feel of your website. In the Dashboard menu on the left side, select Appearance…Themes. You can find both themes there. Select Add New Themes and look through more than 2000 free themes. You can Preview themes to see how they look at full screen size. If you like one, click Install to download and Activate to convert your site to the new theme. Choose a style suitable for your purposes. If you want to change your theme later, you can change themes anytime.

Next, from the WordPress Dashboard, select Settings…General at the bottom. Enter your information in the settings fields.

WordPress has a terrific support structure. You can always click on Documentation at the bottom of the page. Many themes also have support from their writers.

Now, you are ready to add your unique content to your website. Content can appear in two primary formats:

• Posts—posts are article-like content that appears on your website’s front page. You can write these in Microsoft Word (spell and grammar check!) and cut and paste them into the Posts…Add New section. For a basic website, disable comments at the bottom, correct any format issues, and add appropriate descriptive tags so that search engines understand your content topics. Click Preview to see how your post will look on your website. If you are satisfied, click Publish. You can edit your post at any time. For most general websites, one front-page post is probably all you need. Bloggers will have many posts.
• Pages—pages generally appear across the top of your website and are usually accessible from anywhere on your website. Home, About, and Contact Us are common pages that you probably want. Add your page content in the Pages…Add New section. You can write and check these in Microsoft Word and cut and paste into WordPress too.

Add photos to your website to make it more visually appealing. Different themes may require photos/images in different places on the server. Read your theme’s documents. You can easily include/upload in-Post images right in the Post editor. To add Sidebar and banner images, use the File Manager in the Control Panel to upload images to the proper server directory.

Almost all WordPress themes include at least one Sidebar, usually several. From the WordPress Dashboard, select Appearance…Widgets. Widgets are pre-made software functionality packets that you can add to Sidebars and other locations to customize your website. For example, drag the calendar widget to the left Sidebar to add the calendar. Click SAVE and close. At the top of the WordPress, click Visit Site. You may need to hit refresh on your browser a few times to see how the widget looks. WordPress and your theme come with a good selection of widget options. Others are available for download through WordPress documentation and independent developers.

To add photos/images to a Sidebar, drag the Text widget to the Sidebar. Enter a title. In the widget body, enter the HTML link to your image on the server.

In most themes, changing banner images or adding a logo is fairly easy. Check your theme’s help or the WordPress documentation.

You should have a really good website for under $100 now! Congratulations.

No doubt, you will want to continue to tweak and enhance your website. We encourage you to review the WordPress documents to learn more about the free, powerful features and tools that WordPress offers. Most themes have their name at the bottom of the website page (footer). Type that name phrase into Google to search for other websites to see how they use the same theme you are using. It is a great way to get new, creative ideas. Most themes have been downloaded thousands of times—you can see the download number statistics in the WordPress theme directory.