Until they begin their involvement and gain experience in the web market, most people think that the true web site cost is the amount charged by the access provider and host presence service. This is not where the costs reside. The true cost (over 90-percent) is the pages, marketing of those pages, and maintenance of the site. In the cost area, a small business has some advantages over large corporations in the web market.

• Large businesses. A large corporation usually has existing contracts or staff that have the needed expertise to develop a site. They simply assign the required staff to the job. With overhead, the costs to bring a corporate site on-line often reach $100,000 to $1,000,000. This is because they want their own server, have a large product base to install and maintain, want their people continuously connected, and a host of other reasons. Access charges alone can exceed $2,000 per month.
• Small to medium businesses. The cost for a small business site is far less than a large business. The problem many of these businesses have in their web-marketing effort is a lack of Internet and computer expertise within their business. This makes it difficult to get it done correctly, so you reach your market and get a good return on your investment.

What makes up placing a business on the Internet?

Access. Did you know that you do not even need to have access to the web to have an Internet business presence. However, you must have a way for your customer to contact you. In addition to address information and depending on customer phone calls, an e-mail without a computer is possible. This is a message forwarding service such as that provided by OfficeOnWeb. Messages are forwarded from the web to a FAX receipt line at the business. The cost for this is low and since many messages are orders, pay for themselves. (We host several businesses that use this option for a successful web presence.)

Most business prefer to handle their own e-mail. This best business option is to have a dial-up access with e-mail forwarding services. That way your e-mail address stays stable regardless of any moves you may make in dial-up or other access issues. A continuous connection for you to receive messages immediately is rarely needed.

Internet Marketing. You know your product and what sells it. But, the Internet operates differently than other marketing media. Making sure people can find your business in the midst of over 100 million possibilities (there are more than 100 million pages on the Internet) requires highly detailed knowledge and understanding of the intricacies of the web. Don't believe that you can purchase a "spider" registration engine and get the result you want. They don't work well and may actually cause you to be removed from some places. (Some of the registration services use them to reduce their costs. Beware of them.)

Once the customer finds your pages, marketing savvy doesn't end, it begins. Customers want a level of interactive responses that help them find the item they want. None of us purchase just to buy. We have reasons we purchase, and reasons we visit a place just to window shop. People surf the web for the same reasons they pick up a magazine or newspaper-- information and entertainment. But with it's with a twist, the web can do more and we expect more. That means that you need to give more than just the technical information that tells the customer about the product, you need to demonstrate it. That requires programming understanding and experience.

Thus, Internet marketing usually requires two cooperative partners. The experts in the business being marketed, and the Internet experts.

The technical parts and their true cost

Hosting. Hosting services are not equal. The cost ranges between "free" and far more than $100 per month. The difference is the amount of services you obtain in that hosting agreement, its speed of access for the typical customer, and the reliability of its presence in the business environment.

It's true. Some host services can be obtained for "free." However, they are not really free. First, you still need dial-in web access to reach the host services. Usually, these free host services are provided to generate visitor traffic to meet and market a particular advertising campaign or strategy. They are almost always at the discretion of the provider. That means these services are subject to cancellation. If the service is canceled, it negates most of your marketing efforts and the associated costs for those efforts (see a real life example of this). Large business sites will reduce their profitability and they usually have space and traffic limitations that make expansion and changes difficult (or impossible). To keep their costs low, you are responsible for installation, maintenance, and marketing your site. Visitor statistic monitoring is usually nonexistent, or limited at best. With so many restrictions and risks, these "free" services are rarely cost effective for a business that wants to succeed in their web marketing effort. If you are going to go to all the effort and support expense required of a "free" site, we recommend you obtain either

1. Our economical virtual (domain) services and own your site and its name. To help market your new site, we offer the added value of a mirror of your virtual server (provided it is obtained from OfficeOnWeb Technologies) as a suite within the site-wide marketed OfficeOnWeb.
2. Our mall customer maintained and operated web site option. This produces traffic for you fast while allowing you to avoid the overhead technical requirements and costs associated with a virtual site.

A business can operate their web site without any expertise at all too. The OfficeOnWeb monitored, improved, and managed agreement cost only an initial fee for the first page and a small added fee for each additional page. Many business find that this or a combination of some pages managed this way and others maintained total by the customer staff serve them much more economically than free or other similar low cost providers.

OfficeOnWeb is designed to be an economical presence provider. We host most businesses for a cost ranging from $15 per month to about $60. When a virtual domain or a monitored, improved and managed agreement is in place, this includes statistical, e-mail, and other support services. All the businesses within OfficeOnWeb and MallOnWeb receive site-wide marketing.

With OfficeOnWeb we cover m,any of the major technical support costs required through our hosting fee. Even the domain or virtual server service won't require you to have, or independently hire, the more technical expertise needed to support it. All of it is there-- and it is working for you.

Page Development. This is one of the first big areas where costs are incurred. But not at OfficeOnWeb. We get you on the web for as little as $180 to start plus a one-year lease. That is only $330 for a full year of business Internet presence ($180 for the year lease and $150 one time cost for a web page). Many businesses located within OfficeOnWeb pay no more than $600 for an effective acceptable site first year installation and lease. Look around at them. The only fully custom site located in OfficeOnWeb right now is suite 10 and was formerly located on its own virtual server.

Independent surveys show that the typical small business site, through other host and page generation services, actually cost $5,000 or more. The standard cost for a web-page development is $350 to $1,000 per "web page." (A web page is often several printed pages in length and the average price of a typical page is $250.) Graphics can be a pain to watch and are usually costly to generate, but they are necessary to obtaining decent visitation and sales. People are visually oriented. However, they can easily be overdone and drive people away too. They need to be present, but not too present (real-life example).

OfficeOnWeb solves all these problems and gives your business the economic price break by using standard page layouts, an extensive library of graphics, and standardized connections within the site. This keeps development costs low, while still allowing you to generate the look and feel of your web site. Standard page development is only $100 per page and because of the large range of options, have much of the appearance of the custom page. Also, as your business grows, so can your site and its complexity. Once you business is ready, custom pages and graphics are available through us at highly competitive rates.

Site Maintenance. To reduce costs for you, OfficeOnWeb has economical options available to maintain the site for you. We can load the pages, upgrade the access points, notify domain registrations if connections shift, and more. When you obtain one of our suite options, we avoid the chance that an well meaning person operating another business site accidentally harms your web site. One of the ways we do this is by limiting the capacity to load pages on the server to OfficeOnWeb staff. In these type of site we also review every page, to ensure that everyone can access your business through maintenance of the rating services G-rating for the entire site

Computer Expertise. This is often the biggest problem feature for most small businesses wanting an Internet presence. Most businesses don't have someone with programming, computer, Internet, and all the other specialized expertise needed to generate an effective web site. Even if they do, they probably need them to being doing other work, and cannot afford to lose them to such a task. That means that hiring someone is necessary. But the unfamiliar lingo and specifics of the technical expertise required gets in the way of hiring the right people. It is that other language that gets used: POP, ppp, slip, ISDN access; HTML, Java, JavaScript, VScript coding; and so on. How to select the right expertise and avoid pitfalls can be a problem.

The staff and contractors with OfficeOnWeb have all the expertise and experience needed. OfficeOnWeb will help you get the right web site online and the one that meets your desires for control. Further, we will help you avoid common associated losses in productivity of your business due to the added demands of a web site. We can help you avoid the pitfalls that you did not know existed and would probably prefer to not know about. (Especially through experiencing them first-hand.)

Marketing Expertise. The best product, the best location, the best service; and no customers. If your customers don't know about you, they never learn what they are missing. Getting the message out takes a lot of work. Whether you want a virtual, office, or mall type web site, we can help. We offer assistance in doing yourself or getting one of our experts to do it.

OfficeOnWeb is marketed throughout the web using our considerable expertise. Thus, when you locate here, you obtain the benefits of being in a location that is marketed by people who know how to reach potential market resources. The design of the web site offers people the opportunity to browse like they do in a mall or building. That way they don't get frustrated by being lost in an electronic maze, and can check out other locations in OfficeOnWeb. A significant number of people enter OfficeOnWeb because of one page, and end up checking out other seemingly unrelated pages. How many times have you made a spontaneous purchase at the mall? Was it a purchase you did not come to the mall to make? Same concept here.