The best way to build a fast, professional, affordable website these days is to use a website builder service like Intuit or Wix or Yola. There's many of these sites available, so you'll need to read some reviews and ratings to see which is best for your needs. The website easywebsitebuilders.net does a good job of reviewing the best services available. Good luck!

Thank you for your replies. This thread is now read-only.

I would like to share an option that was recommended to me which is Adobe Dreamweaver. You can, with the aid of youtube videos, create a website yourself. You will not be at the mercy of any webmasters and can update your content easily as needed. The software is retail priced around $500, webhosting can be very affordable and domain names are 10 bucks. If you are doing ecommerce, then I'm afraid that is beyond my experience. I have heard of people using paypal as an affordable option to the overpriced financial companies and many consumers have paypal accounts. I hope that helps

If you are new with building a website, try to follow this link, freewebsitemaker.co.uk, it is a site that can help a user build their own site for free. Also in this site is a list of all website hoster that have been reviewed and ranked according to the number of users using it. Like I said, all of the web hoster in the site is free. I hope this will help you building your company website. ---This post was edited to remove a commercial link. Read our discussion policies for more Community best practices.

If you are new with building a website, try to follow this link freewebsitemaker.co.uk, it is a site that can help a user build their own site for free. Also in this site is a list of all website hoster that have been reviewed and ranked according to the number of users using it. Like I said, all of the web hoster in the site is free. I hope this will help you building your company website. ---This post was edited to remove a commercial link. Read our discussion policies for more Community best practices.

I searched on the web and I found wix.com. It helps you to create interactive free flash website. You can easily customize the pages. Regarding domains, you can get one for $8 per year easily. If you need more help, then do reply back.

Hi Marcus, Congratulations on getting started with your website. I see that you received a lot of good advice and after building over 25,000 real estate websites over the last 15 years we learned a few more tips that I didn't see posted yet: Although some of the responses pointed you to other sites I want to give you a few thoughts when selecting your direction. First off you need to understand your goals. Hostingdiva provided a good explanation on first determining what you want your site to do. Most of the time, our customers say they want to rank high on the search engines. I this is the case for you then your most important first step is to register a domain name that includes the keywords you expect to be searched for. You are in the textile business so think about how you want customers to find you and register a name with those words. This is KEY! Then your site developer should know that Google ranks sites first by domain name, then title tags, then your first H1 (headline) tag then the body copy. When all these tell a consistent story for the Google index robot, then you will get the best results. Yes, meta tags and description are important, but these are way down the list for website SEO. My preference for maximum website SEO is to build your site on a blog platform. Today you have a lot of creative freedom with a blog such as a Wordpress version and Goolge really likes to crawl these sites more than a regular website. Make sure to check references and ideally you find a website designer that has experience in your industry. Once you have your requirements clearly thought through, on paper you are ready to seek bids from developers around the globe from a site like www.elance.com where thousands of web designers are ready to bid on your job so you can select the bid with the best price and experience. We use them and it works pretty good (sort of like eBay for freelance help), especially like them since each freelance contractor is rated and reviewed by customers they have done work for. Good luck and I hope this helps! Message Edited by ChristineL on 11-27-2009 11:31 AM

    As many others in this discussion have suggested be clear about the objectives of your website.   Is it just an online business brochure for existing customers or new prospects and you'll send the traffic directly to the site?   Or do you intend to use it as an internet marketing vehicle to attract new business?  If so, will you rely solely on getting organic search traffic? Or will you do advertising (pay-per-click or offline link ads?)  Either way you must know how to do keyword research or the consultant you hire does.   There are a number of technical skills required but the  primary skills to develop an effective internet marketing website are:   a) keyword research and search engine optimisation (to get you to the top of the search results for terms relevant to your business)   and b) layout and design that focuses on visitor usability and conversion.   If the visitor finds the site hard to read or hard to navigate, can't find what they are looking for, they will leave very quickly.   And if you plan to do pay-per-click advertising, this is yet another very specialized skill.    Too many website developers are geeks or graphic designers and their focus is making it look pretty with animation and flashy menus and never mind if the user finds it impossible to navigate or Google can't crawl it.  Be wary.  I think it is hard to find one consultant who does it all well. I would expect to hire a consultant who can faciliate the project.   That might sound expensive but in the long run, it probably costs less.   Let's say a consultant who is an expert in internet marketing, knows how to do keyword research, search engine optimisation and works with a network of other experts including a  website builder who can execute the plan and is sensitive to conversion and usability designs.   Many business people learn how to do it themselves.  It is doable and I would not discourage anyone who has the time and likes learning but it is not as simple and easy as many people make it sound.    I personally recommend a wordpress platform. It is a fast, flexible, cost effective way to get a search-engine-friendly website up and running.  The software is free (provided by almost every hosting service), there are tons of free and inexpensive tools to go along with it and a huge community of people and small businesses in particular, including skilled website builders, who use and support this platform.   Whether you build it yourself or you hire someone, this platform has many many benefits and should serve to keep your development and maintenance costs down.   P.S. I just checked out www.vanseodesign.com ...someone else in this discussion suggested him/her.  I am very impressed with the content of their site. Might be a consultant who can do it all.   Ginger Mudd I help IT people migrating to Australia find jobs.   I am an IT Consultant myself.   Message Edited by muddg on 11-25-2009 06:53 AM

I could help you in building one shopping cart for you. PM me the details if you wish.

Try using wordpress free themes or Opensource OSCOMMERCE scripting or you can also try zencart for ecommerce. Joomla is also a good open source with many templates. Hope this helps.