Ask yourself, "Does my business need 24-hour exposure 7 days a week, 365 days a year?" The answer is obvious. What other medium allows you to expose all the benefits of your small business to your target market at their convenience and provide a source of direct correspondence from them to you? The benefits of a website are innumerable.

This all depends on how much content you have. Every business website should have an 'About Us' page (or something similarly titled) to tell your visitors about your business. After that, it depends on what type of business you have. A good rule of thumb is to not overwhelm your audience with too much information on each page. Disperse the information and break it up into digestable pages and paragraphs. Long pages of text tend to overwhelm the reader. Break content up to truly get your audience's attention.

A host is a company that connects your small business website to the World Wide Web 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Argon Studios can provide this service for as little as $9.95 per month.

Yes, we've built many e-commerce solutions for our clients. We'll give you many different options – from very affordable to highly functional, database-driven online stores. Click Here for more E-Commerce options.

The length of time will really depend upon many factors:

a) The size and functionality of the website. (i.e. how many pages you want, if you need advanced scripting for databases, keyword searches, interactivity etc.)

b) The availability and preparedness of the materials such as written content and images you are supplying to your designer. (The more prepared you are the faster it will go!)

c) Amount of custom graphics design, programming and multi-media work involved. (A website might appear simple from the outside, but the programming that drives a website can be quite complicated)

In the majority of cases a face to face meeting isn't necessary and a majority of websites can generally be completed with contact via email and telephone only. This gives you the option to search countrywide or worldwide to find the right designer for you.

You would typically supply the designer with the written content which can be from your current promotional material but it should be rewritten for a website audience since promotional flyers, etc. don't translate well to the internet. Your designer can give you guidelines for writing the content to make it easier. Alternately, some designers can arrange to have your content written for you at an additional cost.

Other less tangible aspects such as design or layout ideas are handled in the preliminary meetings with your designer where you specify any preferred color schemes and sample web sites that appeal to you.

If you are selling products online your designer will require a list of your product line and if you have pictures for each product your designer will need those as well.

There are many different methods which can be used to update websites. The method you choose and the functionality that is built into your website design is solely up to you.

If you have a small website consisting of just a few pages and will only wish to make changes very infrequently, then usually it is more cost effective simply to ask your website designer to carry out these changes for you.

Other methods which are frequently chosen are largely dependant upon how much data or information and pictures you have and how you store this information at present. You may ask your designer if they can provide an online content management system where you can either update individual products/pages/services or particular sections of your website. e.g. company news. This is usually a costly option if you do not have a wide range of frequently changing content, but may be worth it depending on how much your designer charges for updates.

Argon Studios offers a Maintenance package where you can pay a monthly or yearly fee to have your website updated as frequently as you want.