With these general goals in mind, we've found the most successful approach to be to create a website with these features:

* looks professional and represents your company well
* targeted to your customers
* increases customer "comfort level" (by increasing your company's credibility with customers)
* unconfusing, easy to get around and enables people to find what they're looking for (usability)
* designed to make people remember your company (branding)
* images and text created not just to present, but to sell
* contains the information it needs to contain
* downloads fast and is built for easy future expansion
* increases your exposure and attracts interested potential customers through built-in techniques designed for high search engine rankings
* tested in multiple browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.), monitor sizes and screen resolutions
* encourages customers to take action, which also helps to achieve your goals

Websites are cost-effective

It should be becoming clear why websites may cost more than you'd think — creating effective websites require more time, knowledge and effort than many people initially believe. Of course, if your web designer doesn't do all of the above, you may find that you'll need to hire another (or a few) companies to rework the website in order to ensure its workability for your purposes.

Regardless, I think you'll find that using a website to market your products and/or services on the Web is extremely cost-effective. True story: twenty years ago, a full-page ad on the last page of the first section of the Los Angeles Times cost $40,000 … and that's for one-shot advertising that is most definitely not the reason that people buy the publication, whereas people visit websites in order to obtain something.

Whatever the cost, your website will certainly last longer than one issue of a newspaper. It will market effectively for you from here on out, given perhaps $20-$30 a month for web hosting and $10 per year for your domain name (mywebsite.com).

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