Getting started with a site can be a daunting task especially if you are not a techie. Professional designers normally charge you at least few hundred dollars (few thousand ringgit) to custom build a site for you from scratch.

Even that, you have to learn to maintain your site too in the case of an ecommerce or blog. But that should not be difficult as you just need to login and updates. You do not have to play around with the codes if you don’t want to.

How do you normally find the best deals, the best designs for the lowest price? Here’s a rough guide:

Some ads I see are charging between $500-$600 for a 5 page site. These companies you found online can include designer’s wages, advertising costs and so on.

You can easily buy a premium or established site at sitepoint.com with the price, if you are lucky. Sometimes, there are really good offer at sitepoint.com. You should really check it out often. Some of these sites are already making a small amount of money. If the price is right, it’s really worth a purchase.

OR what you can do is find freelance designers who work from home. These people are often working from home so they do not have a high operation cost like that of a company.

Many of them able to design images with quality like those of designers from big companies, so it’s a “no-brainer” choice.

However, choose freelancers with care. Some of the famous site to find a freelancer are elance.com, getafreelancer.com or guru.com.

There, you can post the abstract of your project and get some freelancers to bid on your project. But take heed, you may find or may not find the best deals.

As with all things online, be careful when choosing your designer. I don’t really have any favorable experience to say about the freelancers in these sites. But i do know many people who have hired some really good ones and are using them in the long run.

Look at their experience, past transactions and ratings, so your value for money is secured.

Always ask for many samples design if you are unsure. If the designer response is not professional or is impatient with your many questions, then you can drop them.

If you still can’t find the designer you looking for when nearing the expiring period, just extend or relist it.

Another route you can take is to design your website yourself.

Think about it, sometimes you only need some simple pages to present some simple information, why waste hundreds of dollars for it?

Just spend a little time to sit down and do it yourself. It’s not difficult to find tutorials online for starting a website or blog.