With the advent of internet, the whole world has become a marketplace for goods and services. Small businesses are trying to tap into this potential market and are increasingly looking for a web presence and to start their websites. Websites are no longer a luxury but a necessity to display your products and services to the global audience.

Many of your readers reading the article will be looking to start a website and wondering about where to get started

First you need to create a plan regarding what you will doing with your website. Based on your initial plans and budget your website requirements can have completely different solutions. Always remember your website should be aligned to your business goals. Many people start a website because somebody told them to or their friends or another competing business has created a website. This is a wrong approach, always remember your website should be built with a specific purpose in mind and serve a particular goal. If you just want to promote info about your business/products/ services and ask potential clients to contact, your website should be geared towards that, while if you are selling goods, your website can be setup so that your clients can browse your goods and order them using the site. Websites can also be built to promote the next big event in your company or spread the word around for the next big product you are about to launch.

Once you have planned out what you want to build the site for, you would need to decide on the web address (domain name) where your site will be hosted. You need to go to a web hosting provider and buy one of their plans(domain name + hosting). For business making a new web presence, I would like to suggest HostGator.com as your web hosting provider, they offer reliable and cost effective plans starting at very affordable prices. For small startup sites, shared hosting/unlimited hosting plans should do, if you are looking to build large ecommerce or social networks, with thousands of visitors you should go in for a dedicated server plans.

Once you have got the domain and hosting, its time to build the site. Get a good web design and development provider who can offer you best solution for your needs at affordable prices. For small info sites and blogs you can go with Wordpress (which is one of worldâEUR(TM)s best CMS cum blogging platform), Even a custom designed Wordpress based site, costs less from design and development point of view, you can also manage the content on your own and lot of features come off the self and easy to add and use. For ecommerce sites looking to sell products OSCommerce can be a good solution.

Once the site is developed your web design and development provider should provide you with a test url to review your site before the site goes live. Once everything is working properly its time to host your site live.

Well this is not the end of story, having a site up and running is only half the job done. Next you need to focus on SEO to get traffic and promote your site. There are several easy ways to start your SEO/promotions on affordable budgets and slowly gain popularity. They are also ways to track your visitors using analytics and make improvements to your site to make it better and get more traffic and sales. But thatâEUR(TM)s a story for another day

Get ready and get started on your first site.

Best of Luck