With growing popularity and automation of wyswig (what you see is what you get) web site design software titles, a growing number of small business and individuals are creating their own web sites. Should you make your own web site? One school of thought is that you can save yourself some cash by making your own web site, and saving some cash is always a good thing. The other school of thought is that in order to make a top quality product equal to what you provide your customers with on a daily basis you are going to have to invest some money in some quality software.

You would need to purchase a web site design program like Macromedia's Dreamweaver and if you plan on embellishing your web site with some of your digital photography you will need some photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia's Fireworks. Even if you take fantastic pictures you will still need to optimize them for fast loading in your customers web browser. An unedited five megapixel photo takes up about a 19x19 inch screen and if you put two of those puppies on a web page and your customer does not have broadband internet access they will be nodding off before your page is viewable. And that equals bye bye visitor.

Web design companies in Birmingham are in a very competitive market and some offer some great deals at various times of year.

People who are just starting out in a career building custom design websites will often offer their services at a very reasonable rate, basically to build up a portfolio. Once they have established themselves they then tend to increase amount they charge.

I have even heard about one person who for a very short period of time was building websites for free! This is an extreme case though.