Just this past month Bing gained more of a percentage of market share than any of the other major search engines – up more than 22% from July, according to Nielsen. With Google’s perennial firm grasp on the #1 spot, this leaves Yahoo! and Bing to duke it out for numero dos…and Bing is gaining ground fast.

Until now, if you were thinking about expanding your search engine marketing campaign beyond Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) was the natural consideration; Bing (Microsoft Ad Center) not as much. But Bing just became a whole lot more appealing.

There’s a minimum amount of overhead required to start up and manage a search marketing campaign…and for some industries Microsoft’s search engines (MSN and Live Search) have traditionally not offered enough eyeballs to justify the time required to manage an ad campain on their platform. But as it gets closer to matching the number of searches on Yahoo!, Bing becomes more appealing to advertisers, and ad prices across all three of the top search engines could become a bit more competitive.

Another major factor affecting the cost of any website project is the list of requirements. It pays to identify these requirements up front (one of the best ways to end up with an unattractive or otherwise useless website is to let your web designer define the project for you). Generally buyers have only a vague idea of what they want, and service providers fail to understand the idea fully, which can result in technical service providers making business recommendations, or even building a website which doesn’t fit the customer’s need. For sizable projects, an experienced project manager should help you identify your business needs. But educating yourself about the available options can allow you to better explain requirements yourself, keep cost in line, and ensure that the end product is what was needed in the first place.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective) there are infinite options for your business website. Below are a few of the most popular options available to small businesses on a budget – along with some pro’s and con’s of each.

Canned site and One-Click CMS Installation: Many hosting accounts now come with a feature that makes it fairly easy to create a website very little technical knowledge. Canned sites (i.e.: GoDaddy’s Website Tonight, $6 – $10/month) are inexpensive, but very limited in terms of functionality – normally only used to create the most basic of brochure sites. Now, in all honesty, just because “website in a can” is an option does not mean it is a realistic business website solution. The only reason I’m including it here is because due to the attractive price tag many (very) small businesses are tempted to give it a shot for their first venture online. However, in terms of building your brand on the internet, these sites are extremely limited out of the box (or can, if you will), and not at all recommended. GoDaddy’s example Website Tonight website is: OnlineExample.com

Yahoo’s Small Business E-commerce solution promises to be a bit more comprehensive for e-commerce (shopping) sites. They charge $50 to get set up, then $40/month, plus a 1.5% transaction fee. It’s about the easiest shopping cart solution I know of, although for a truly custom look you will need to involve a designer. An example of a Yahoo Small Business e-commerce installation is SoftTurtle.com

But other options are becoming more commonly available – including one-click-install (using offerings like Fantastico) of open source (w) Content Management Systems (CMS) (w), such as Joomla and Drupal, and blogs, such as WordPress – all for free. All you have to do is log in as an administrator to your hosting account, sign up or install your service of choice, add pictures, text, pages, and change the visual themes, and with a weekend of plugging away you’ll have a website. For any of these options, of course you’ll still need to purchase a domain ($7 – $10/year) and a hosting account ($7 – $20/month) for at least 12 months to start. One very rough example of a one-click Joomla website that was launched in about 45 minutes, just for reference for this article, is AdultOnlyChild.com.

Customize Solutions Based on Packaged Software: CMS and blog platforms offer much more flexibility and feature options, such as organized content, news feeds, polls, and basic banner (advertisement) management. The CMS and blog solutions named above have enormous user groups that provide all kinds of “plug-ins” to help make your open source website extremely flexible and customizable. The ReitherCo Blog and the MyFamilyLaw Celebrity Divorce Blog are examples WordPress sites that can be launched for a couple thousand dollars, but don’t forget, you still need to write the content.

You can also use one system for your text content, and another for your products. For example, one of the better shopping cart systems available for the money, X-Cart, can now be integrated with Joomla, using a recently developed plug-in. To incorporate these plug-ins, or a visual theme to represent your logo and company brand, expect to need a web designer. You should be able to have a nice looking, functional brochure or portal site for $1,000 to $3,000 – maybe $7,000 to $10,000 with the shopping cart integration (this combination would yield a very capable e-commerce site). With the right team to execute the project, these solutions will cover the needs of the vast majority of small e-commerce businesses.

Highly Customized vs. Proprietary from the Ground Up: If standard functionality and basic design modifications (the solutions above) don’t quite cut it for you, that doesn’t mean it’s time for a from-scratch development project. Because ground-up solutions are costly and frequently unnecessary, it’s worth double checking your assumptions about whether the right system is not already available for you. Do you have ideas for your website’s functionality that aren’t covered or easily customized in the packaged blog or CMS systems? Before you jump to this conclusion, do yourself a favor and get familiar with the standard system setup of some of the available CMS’s. Have someone on your team do a one-click install of Joomla or Drupal (using Fantastico), and get familiar with the administrative back-end of the system. Take a demo on either of the CMS’s main websites. Because it’s almost always less expensive to buy than it is to build a new system, it’s worth seeing what’s out there that will work for you. If open source doesn’t provide the kind of support or guarantee you’re looking for, consider one of the other major CMS vendors. An example of a highly customized Joomla driven website, with a WordPress blog: MyFamilyLaw.com

Next: Business Website Cost (Part 6): Other Cost Variables

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