As a website designer, this is often first question that I am asked by a new client. The simple answer is that it costs whatever you are willing to spend; anywhere from free to millions of dollars. A more productive process to address issue of cost is to answer a series of questions.

What are your needs, goals and expectations?

What are needs and expectations of your site visitors, customers and clients?

Is your business already established with its unique brand/identity?

What is required in terms of skills, experience and level of design?

Do you want to hire a high profile design house, a medium sized design studio, a small company or a student? What can you afford to budget for your project?

We’ll take a look at these questions to see how they influence cost of creating a website, look at two simple examples and give you some ideas for coming up with a budget for your project. In general, cost for a website will be based on how long it takes for design and implementation plus any additional costs required for hardware or software. While there are certainly no hard and fast rules, more experienced design company, higher their hourly rate. Generally, more robust and complicated site needs to be -- whether for handling large amounts of traffic, for technically sophisticated programming and database integration or for specialized images and text -- higher cost.

What are your needs, goals and expectations? What are needs and expectations of your site visitors, customers and clients?

It’s important to address what your ideas are for a website and why you want one. There may also be details or uses that you haven’t considered. The needs and expectations of your target markets are also important and will also address your analysis of your competition. A good designer will support you through a process to determine what is required to achieve results you require. PlanetLink often provides this as a consulting service with a portion of fees applied towards actual design work. Projects can also be implemented over time so that costs can be spread out. The more involved needs of project, greater cost.

Is your business already established with its unique brand/identity?

Websites on a tight budget generally don’t address this issue. It’s important that your website accurately represent who you are from perspective of "look and feel." If way your business is visually and thematically represented is structured and effective, then process of creating imagery for your website will ideally be an extension of what already exists. If budget allows, for businesses without a unique identity or style, often generation of website is an opportunity to create print materials at same time, thus saving costs.

Email Tips and Tricks

Excerpted from upcoming book The Busy Person's Guide to a Profitable Website and PlanetLink's Enews - an email newsletter delivered for FREE to your computer. To subscribe, go to www.planetlink.com.

We'll explore use and abuse of email and discuss how you can use it more effectively in your business.

Email has become most used service on Internet. According to a Gallup Poll survey, 52%, of email users says that sending and receiving email is their most common online activity.

Consider these statistics:

• By year-end 2002, there will be 135 million email users, representing 59% of overall U.S. population of adults and teens.

• There were 409 million email boxes worldwide in 1999, up from 234 million a year earlier.

• When asked their opinion on spam, 42% of email users say they "hate it," 45% say they find it "an annoyance, but do not hate it," while rest have no strong feelings either way .

Here's some tips you can use to make most effective use of email:

Keep business emails specific and to point.