It’s extremely important for every business to have an internet presence in today’s economy, and that means having a website up and running. If you don’t have a big budget, that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck, it just means you have to know how to spend the money you do have.

There are a few expenses you’re going to have to drop money on regardless of your budget, and your skill set. You’re going to need a domain name for your new website. Registering a domain name is a quick and easy process, and it will only cost you around $10 per year. Once you have a domain name, you’re going to need to invest in a web hosting package. Web hosting can cost anywhere between five dollars a month, to several hundred a month. When you’re first starting out, even if you’re anticipating a lot of attention for your website, it’s best to go with one of the cheaper packages. Chances are you won’t need the features and benefits provided with the more expensive packages in the beginning, so don’t spend money on them.

Once you have a domain name, and a place to host your site, it’s time to worry about actually getting your site up and running. There are three routes you can go here. You can either build the site yourself, pay a freelancer to build it, or pay a firm to build it. There are a lot of great options for building your own site. Blogging platforms like WordPress can be installed directly to your hosting account for free, and they make set up a snap. There are also a lot of software options available to make designing a site easy. If you already have Microsoft Office, you probably already have Microsoft Publisher. Publisher makes it fairly simple to create a nice looking website in a fairly short amount of time.

If you really feel like you can’t handle setting up the website yourself, then you’re going to have to pay someone. If you’re on a budget, you’re going to want to avoid design firms. Their prices reflect all  of the costs involved in running a large company. Freelancers, on the other hand, will generally be able to product a high quality site for you for hundreds, rather than thousands of dollars. Just be careful about who you hire. Either use a site like Elance to find a designer, or get references from them before hiring them to do the job.

Don’t be fooled into paying exorbitant amounts of money for a website. By being careful with your money, you can get your site up and running quickly no mater what your budget is.

If you’ve ever thought about starting a new website, chances are you have looked into hiring a professional designer. A lot of design firms charge extremely high rates for simple websites, and in many cases there are additional costs for different types of functionality. With design firms charging such high rates, it’s hard to imagine getting a website off the ground on a budget, but it can definitely be done.

Setting up a site using WordPress is actually fairly simple. If you’re comfortable with some light HTML, chances are you could do it yourself, as long as you’re not looking for anything too complicated. Most hosting providers offer an automatic install of WordPress, and once it’s installed, all you really need to do is make a few simple tweaks to the theme to get it looking the way you want it to. If you’d like to add a little bit of additional functionality to your site, there are many plugins and widgets available for WordPress that allow you to do a wide variety of things. There are some plugins to help with SEO optimization, some to add things like polls to your site, and some to allow you to embed a podcast right into a post. Some of them require a little more effort to set up than others, but if you’re on a tight budget it might be worth the time.

If design firm prices don’t fit in your budget, and you don’t feel like you could learn to set up a site on your own, there’s a third option. Sites like elance.com let you connect with many freelance designers. Freelancers can often product the same quality work that a large firm would deliver, but given that their operating cost is significantly lower, you’ll get a much better price out of them. It’s important to go through a site like elance rather than just searching Craigslist for a freelancer. Elance, and other sites like it let you see a designer’s profile, along with reviews of their work. That way, you can be sure you’re getting a designer that can handle your site, and won’t leave you high and dry if there’s a problem.

Don’t be discouraged by the prices big design firms offer. If you take the time to do a little work with your site yourself, or if you can find a freelancer that suits your budget, your site can become a reality, even if your budget is tight.