An online brochure

If you're willing to choose from somewhat customizable off-the-shelf designs, you can have a website for from $15 to $200 a year. These are do-it-yourself projects, but you don't have to know anything about HTML or other web technologies. The thing to be careful about is to choose a reputable company that offers site building tools and good support. , for example, is inexpensive, offers there own easy to use tools and good phone support. Homestead is one of the largest of these types of hosting companies. They cost a bit less and also specialize in serving the beginning website builder. Yahoo! Web Hosting is reliable and affordable. They offer an offline tool that's pretty easy to use. Register.com, which started out as a website URL registration company, offers small do-it-yourself websites starting at $5.95 a month.

An online store

For as little as $6.95 a month and some sweat equity, you can set up a store that will enable you to offer your products to customers around the world. No HTML or technical expertise required. Some web hosting companies offer an online store as part of the hosting package.

ProStores - an eBay Company offers a special ecommerce package. Their environment is specially designed for non-technical people. It's got a simple point and click interface, which you can learn to use with a 15 minute tutorial. The name, the hosting and the site creation tools are all in one place. There's lots of handholding, with live chat support if you get stuck. GoDaddy.com Hosting Plans has a Quick Shopping cart, starting at $9.95 a month. They're a reliable company with excellent phone support.
midPhase Hosting is $7.95/mo for a site with a shopping cart, but you may find the discussion of megabytes and bandwidth a bit offputting.

The question you need to ask yourself before choosing is: Which is more important for you: lower cost or greater ease of use. Choose carefully, because shopping carts take time to build, product by product.

The other cost you will incur with an online store centers around accepting credit cards. Your hosting company will offer you a "merchant gateway", which will connect you with a credit card processing company, along with instructions on how to set it up. HOWEVER, the credit card processing company has its own fees, usually a startup fee of $100 or so dollars, and frequently a monthly fee as well as a small percentage of each charge.

You can get around this by opening a PayPal account. There are no up front fees, just a small percentage of each payment made to you. They even offer a simple, very basic, shopping cart builder. They've just recently taken away the biggest drawback to using them, which was the requirement that the person paying you needed to set up an account with them, so they're now a very credible, inexpensive alternative.

Forums and Chat

Forums and chat rooms are a way for people to talk to each other. Forums are online bulletin boards, where people leave messages that others can read and reply to. Chats are real-time text conversations. Both formats are available from many hosting companies. http://www.spboards.com offers free (advertiser supported) forum hosting. vstore offers free live help chat, which is great for people selling big ticket items or offering advice.

An ezine is an electronic newsletter sent out periodically to a list of people who've subscribed to it. Strictly speaking, it's not a website, but it may be the medium you want to use to communicate to people if you've got new things to say frequently, and you know who you want to say them to.

Frequently, an ezine is nothing more than a long email with a big .cc list, but many are formatted with fancy text and graphics.

Many marketers use an ezine in conjunction with a website to inform customers of sales, provide relevant tips. For example, a gardening supply company might send out a newsletter with the subject of how to care for shrubs. And, conveniently, that newsletter will include a link to the company's website. An ezine can also be used to highlight new additions to a website, or new and interesting postings to a forum. As Terri Seymour points out in My Own Ezine, publishing an ezine enables you to keep in contact with the people who are interested in your website, your product and you. You can build a solid foundation of trust and respect on which to base your business success.