Once upon a time, building a website was very expensive.

Now, though, you can have a site up and running for the price of a used book, if you're frugal and careful. Getting the cheapest website you can is a great first step on the ladder, to get started on the web and see if it's for you.

Five-Dollar Domains.

If you're willing to take the less popular domains like .info, or some of the ones for specific countries, then you should easily be able to get your hands on a domain for less than $5. Some countries, such as .tk (the small island of Tokelau), even offer their domains for nothing!

Free Software.

Nowadays, it's easily possible to build a website using nothing but software you can get for free - most of the best scripting languages are free, and each one has had a lot of free software built for it by hobbyists.

Check out sourceforge.net, which is a big repository of free software.

You might think that free software would be less functional than paid-for software, but you'd be wrong. Plenty of free software is simply implementations of standard software, and it works perfectly well - if you want a forum, for example, there's no clear advantage in paying massive license fees to vBulletin (the biggest seller of forum software) instead of just installing the free phpBB.

The free software gives you more flexibility,
and yet comes at no cost.

Free software has become an ideological movement, for people who want to be able to modify their own software, and much of the free software out there is quickly becoming widely-used and standard.

Using free software doesn't make you look cheap, because users are used to seeing it everywhere - even better, the chances are that they already know how to use it.

Templates.

Depending on what kind of website you're running, you could use the design templates that come with your free software - they're usually perfectly adequate. If you don't want to do that, then a quick look around at a site like templatemonster.com is sure to turn up something suitable for your website that only costs a few dollars.

Pay as You Go Hosting.

Instead of asking you to pay monthly for hosting, more and more hosts are starting to offer 'pay as you go' hosting, which means that you only pay for what you use. This saves you a lot of money, because websites that are starting out rarely use all the features & bandwidth they're paying their host to provide.

At nearlyfreespeech.net, for example, you add money to an account and then pay one dollar for each gigabyte of bandwidth you use. Most of these hosts allow you to start an account with very little money - the minimum is usually $5.

If you keep your site light on graphics,
that first $5 can last you a very long time.

Guerrilla Marketing.

Finally, one of the biggest costs associated with any website is marketing it - whether you're planning to pay for banner ads or ads in search engines, marketing is a big cost. You can save money, though, by resorting to more 'guerrilla' techniques, such as becoming involved in online communities than you think might be interested in your website.

The biggest free marketing technique out there is SEO (search engine optimisation), which is when you build your website in a way that makes it more attractive to search engines, getting you targeted visitors for free.

Taking it Further.

Once you've built your budget website, do you need to upgrade it later on when you start to get lots of visitors? Often, the answer is no. You might wish to buy a more prestigious .com domain name, and you might want to pay a professional designer to improve your design, but in most cases the path from a budget website to a big one isn't all that costly either.

You might think you're building a website 'on the cheap' but, really, that's the most sensible way to do it now - while you can go and spend thousands of dollars on software and hosting, you're unlikely to see any real benefits at all.

1. 6 Reasons Why You Need a Website
2. How the Web Works
3. Registering a Domain Name
4. The Confusing World of Web Hosting - Making Your Decision
5. How to Set Up Your Hosting in 5 Minutes Flat
6. Websites and Web logs - What's the Difference?
7. What Do You Want Your Website to Do?
8. Hiring Professionals - 5 Things to Look For
9. Working With Templates
10. Building a Budget Website
11. There's More than One Web Browser
12. Image Formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG and More
13. The Many Flavours of HTML
14. Clean Page Structure - Headings and Lists
15. The Importance of Validation
16. Avoiding the Nuts and Bolts - Content Management Software
17. FrontPage - Easy Pages
18. Dreamweaver - The Professional Touch
19. What You See Isn't Always What You Get
20. Why Doing It Yourself is Best
21. Understanding Web Jargon
22. Don't Be Scared, It's Only Code - HTML for Beginners
23. 5 Steps to Understanding HTML
24. Taking HTML Further
25. Finding a Good HTML Editor
26. CSS and the End of Tables
27. Column Designs with CSS
28. The Basics of Web Servers
29. LAMP - The Most Popular Server System Ever
30. IIS and ASP - Microsoft's Server
31. Setting up a Test Server on Your Own Computer
32. How Databases Work
33. Which Database is Right for You?
34. Uploading Your Website with FTP
35. PHP - Easy Dynamic Websites
36. Perl - Cryptic Power
37. ColdFusion - Quicker Scripting, at a Price
38. JSP - Java on Your Server
39. Python and Ruby - the Newer Alternatives
40. Taking HTML Further with Javascript
41. VBScript - Javascript Made Easy
42. AJAX - Should You Believe the Hype?
43. The Web Designer's Toolbox
44. An Introduction to Paint Shop Pro
45. Photoshop - a Graphic Designer's Dream
46. Free Graphics Alternatives
47. How to Install and Configure a Forum
48. Building Online Communities
49. Using Quizzes and Games to Get Traffic
50. Offering Free Downloads on Your Website
51. Putting Multimedia to Good Use
52. Opening a Web Shop with E-Commerce Software
53. 5 Simple Steps to Accepting Payments
54. Encryption & Security with SSL
55. The Basics of Web Forms
56. 7 Ways to Make Your Web Forms Better
57. The Web is Not Paper
58. Writing for the Web
59. A Question of Scroll Bars
60. Titles and Headlines - It's Not a Newspaper
61. All About Design - Principles and Elements
62. Designing for Search Engines
63. Printing and Sending - the Two Things Users Want to Do
64. The Art of the Logo
65. Picking a Colour Scheme
66. Fonts are More Important Than You Think
67. Beware the Stock Photographer - Picking Your Pictures
68. The Smaller, the Better - Avoiding Graphical Overload
69. An Issue of Width - the Resolution Problem
70. Why Word is Bad for the Web
71. The 5 Principles of Effective Navigation
72. Focus on the User - Task-Oriented Websites
73. Making Searches Simple
74. Time for User Testing
75. Hints All the Way
76. The Case Against Flash
77. Using Flash Sensibly
78. The Evils of PDF's
79. Why Java Will Drive Your Visitors Away
80. 5 Ways to Avoid the 1998 Look
81. Content is King
82. Why You Should Put Your Content in a Weblog Format
83. Cut to the Chase - How to Make Your Website Load Faster
84. How to Run Ads Without Driving Visitors Crazy
85. Ads Under the Radar - Linking to Affiliates
86. Text Ads - Unobtrusive Advertising
87. The Top 10 Biggest Web Design Mistakes
88. Why You Should Stick to Design Conventions
89. 10 Easy Ways to Promote Your Website
90. Making Friends and Influencing People - the Importance of Links
91. How to Get Your Website Talked About on Blogs
92. Tracking Your Visitors
93. RSS - Really Simple Syndication
94. Taking Your Website Mobile
95. Registering Your Users by Stealth
96. How to Make Visitors Add You to Their Favourites
97. Setting Up a Mailing List
98. Designing for Sales
99. It's a World Wide Web - Going International
100. Some Places to Go For More Information

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