Building a small site for $200 or less

Just launched www.avventura.in – for Avventura Outdoors – an adventure sport business promoted by family and friend.  This is what it took

1. Hosting & Domain: Justhost.com had a deal which looked good. However a .in domain required a different registrar.

2. User Design: This was a tough one – especially as the budget was under 100$. After a lot of search – i settled on “supermaket shopping” instead of tailoring. So chose one at TemplateMonster.com – all of $68

3. Technology Decision: Like any company, the need was to have static pages, testimonial, social activity, photo gallery, video, polls, blog, a small ecommerce and the works.  Given the feature list – I almost made up my mind to go to Drupal – before finally settling on Static HTML site with everything else happening on Facebook and WordPress and using eBay marketplace for commerce.  Just think about it. In professional life, it doesnt seemed good enough – but put a constraint of 200$ to put a website – and the HTML you get from templatemonster looks great ( they even have a lot of Drupal templates – but we happened to like a HTML template).

BTW – templatemonster is neat – it give PSDs and Fonts and HTMLs.

Content: Yet to figure out where to get photos from. Shutterstock.com seems to have best combination of pictures and price. So far sticking with what came by default till replaced by original pictures and keeping 50$ in reserve for buying pictures.

Setting up the HTML files and updating content took about 2 hours per page.

SEO: Just started and looking at whether its worth buying something for remaining 80$. I guess will go with standard search engine submission and inviting comments / links from websites of friends and family and business associates – till it happens.