Freestart Websites are usually quite cheep giving a good reason to purchase at £99 plus VAT! However once you become a new customer you will be provided with a control panel which will enable you to choose from 1 of 300 or so templates. Because these are templates you cannot change the design or the banner, which is the top portion of the website. Weeks later or even months in some cases you will be contacted by an account manager who will ask what your requirements are to see if he or she can identify yet another sale. A site map is usually the last resort sale as they will say this is required to enable a higher ranking on google at an additional cost between £25 to £50 or even £100 depending on the account managers sales targets at the time.
You will be quickly annoyed as this was not mentioned at the start and belive this is needed to gain decent traffic. Once you have a site map they may try to sell website terms and conditions and a privacy policy they say to protect you at a cost of £50 each sometimes free if you purchase an upgrade lol.
Weeks later they will call again to show you an upgraded website which may contain flash design or even a company logo on the site, this will cost you £25 for your own logo to be placed into the template and a flash banner i.e changing images which you supply for another £225.00 plus VAT !! oh they may throw in a bespoke colour change to your requirements free of charge otherwise thats another £150.00.
So when you have finally paid to upgrade your current website with all the additional extras and feel its great they will call you weeks or months later to show you a website ten times better than the one you were sold at a cost of anything up to £500 plus!!
When they have finished upselling on your website and feel they cant sell anymore to you they will offer you checkrate there own branded seal to say your website is safe to buy from backed by dun & bradstreet and credit safe!
I know this because I once worked for the company, what I will say is this. The websites freestart plc offer for the initial outlay are quite cheap compared to most in the market but there are the additional costs to consider when buying a website. Also make sure the website is compatible for what you want it to do ie ask if they do rss feeds and xhtml scripting and can you have access to the php files in order to achieve great seo or search engine optimisation results. My advice is to make sure you know exactly what you want and make sure this is what you ask for and how much the total will be to achieve this. Once you have this information look around for the best possible quote. Understand there are also other sites offering free websites on domains such as weebly.com etc but how effective are they really. Do people remember Website Builder - Build Your Website Anytime, Anywhere with Freestart or Start an online business without paying a cent. - Home and how does this effect the rankings on google or bing or yahoo. The URL or domain name is an important part of search engine friendly sites this you will learn Mr weebly user. Its one thing having lots of traffic to your website but what use is it when the word weebly is in your domain name and visitors to your site are looking for weebly and not a tree surgeon? relevence is more important than FREE. Its free for a reason!! Oh and please check your site as the language is not in english.
Lastly remember this, your website is your shop window. If it does not look good people will not come in. Having a good looking website is one thing but having it on page one of the search engines means VISITORS, SALES, MONEY.
Want to understand more about who is looking for your business then try the google adwords tool and type in the nature or service of your business and the area you wish to trade and google will tell you how many people searched for your business. Meta tags, meta title, description and keywords including keyword placement in the header and the footer of your page is vital not to mention alt tags on images etc... So please for your own good make sure you choose a company who knows what there doing and can get you listed in directories and search engines. Make sure the website provider can provide seo (Search Engine Optimisation) my last bit of advice for those who wish to build there own site, Its not what the search engines can do for you, its what you can offer the search engines that gets you ranked high.
Check out your site on Alexa the Web Information Company and see if your even on there!!
For further help goto http://www.seo4webs.co.uk:biggrin:
