Components of Your Internet Presence

Access is your ticket to viewing and communicating on the internet. Your access account with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) lets you browse websites and send and receive email. Although you don't need access to have a website, you will realistically need to communicate with the inquiries from your website and should check your email at least twice per day. You will quickly find how convenient email is, and the advantages it has as a business tool. Individual access generally costs $20 or $30 per month, or $40 for DSL.

Counterparts: Cable T.V. service lets you view visual content. Radio (free) lets you listen to audio. Telephone service lets you send and receive communications, verbal and fax. Newspapers and magazines give you access to printed content.

Virtual hosting and set-up is what you will need from an ISP or hosting service to display your website materials on the internet. This is step one of the "distribution" of your website. There will generally be three price components:

  • Purchase of a domain name/URL (optional), generally $9 to $35 per year. MadRiverWeb currently uses a registry that charges $15.00.
  • A monthly hosting fee, generally $10 to $50 (or more for e-commerce, large sites, or complex functionality), that covers use of their computers (servers) to store your materials on their hard drive and display your materials over the internet through their dedicated connections. Review MadRiverWeb's hosting prices.
  • A set-up fee of roughly $30 to $100 one time to program the display of your site from your "virtual" domain name. MadRiverWeb charges $30 to $60.

    Counterparts: You pay the cable company or radio station to post your ad or air your show. You pay the newspaper or magazine to print your ad or insert your brochure or flyer.

Site Development. This may cost several hundred dollars to several thousand depending on the number of pages, graphic complexity, coding and programming intensity and effectiveness, interactive functionality, etc. Fees are generally one time, and work is generally done by some combination of graphic artist, website developer, and/or your ISP.

Counterparts: You pay the t.v. station to produce your show, the ad agency to produce your commercial or ad, the graphic artist and printer to produce your brochure.

Marketing. You may pay ongoing or one-time fees for ads in other websites or links from other websites to your own pages. You may pay fees to your developer to optimize your site and register it in search utilities (the yellow pages of the internet) and other sites from which you will want traffic, or do this yourself. Consider budgeting an amount for promotion for your first year equal to that which you spent for development of your site with the related consulting and services.

Counterparts: You pay the Chamber, trade groups, the newspaper to link to your site or display your ad on their websites.

Notes. If you do not purchase a domain name, your page or site will be part of another site, more like an ad rather than a stand-alone brochure. It will usually be included in a membership or available at a small cost.