A friend of mine asked me recently how “little” it can cost to have your own web site. Here’s my answer:

It really depends on what you want. Do you want a place with your own domain name, such as JonathanSchellack.com? If so, there will be recurring costs (usually monthly) for the domain name and for a place to host the site.

Domain name registration has to be renewed every so often (on a yearly basis), so you can “book” a name for, say, the next 10 years at a cost of something like $100, but then you don’t pay anything more for it for 10 years. Hosting (paying someone for space to keep your site, for their 99.9% connectivity to the internet, and for bandwidth to keep things reasonably fast) will be more costly, ranging from $6/month on up.

If you want to do something like a blog, you only have to pay for the name and the hosting, and then you can get the site “framework” for free by doing something like WordPress — a “personal publishing platform” (www.wordpress.org). They’ll also host your blog for free, if you want — go to www.wordpress.com and you could get, if available, something like schellack.wordpress.com for your site.

You can actually use something like WordPress for things besides a blog — some people have used the web site platform for e-commerce (sell your stuff online) and general business sites. I’m currently developing two different sites in that manner. I’ll likely post more on that in coming months.
If you want to pay someone (like me!) to develop the site, which means to figure out how it will look and work and to make it look and work that way, you will probably pay an hourly amount in the range of $50/hour (on the really cheap side) on up. The problem with that is you don’t want (typically) to pay someone a recurring cost if you can help it — so if you pay someone to make you a site and they are the only ones that can keep it updated, then you’ll have to pay them every time you need the site updated or changed.

The beauty of a thing like WordPress is it’s not only free, but it’s also easy to keep up and maintain for even non-technical people. You don’t have to learn code, you just put the files on your server and fill out some web pages with info on your site. Many people have developed (free) “themes” that you can plug in the change the layout and even the design of the site, with the same backend piece to allow you to keep it updated. I like WordPress because it saves me time — that’s why I use it on www.schellack.net/jonathan and why I set it up as a separate site for my brother’s blog on www.schellack.net/ben. He is non-technical (and uses a Mac), but has no problems using the site.

One significant “cost” of a site is the time involved — if you are going to do something where the point is the content, you will have to keep the site updated, so finding a solution to make it easy and time-efficient is very important. Marketing the site is also important, especially if you want your site to earn money for you (which you can do with ads or by selling stuff), but is difficult to do, because you have to get people to visit, which means you have to do some legwork.

I’ve developed sites for people and small businesses before, so if anyone has any questions, feel free to ask!