In Part 1, I talked about the importance of having your own properly built and implemented business website. But there are many different ways to get there from here, so let’s take a look at those and see why most are not going to cut it for the serious businessperson.

First, you can go the “close to home” route. After all, it seems like half the under-30 population “knows” how to build a website these days. You can co-opt one of your own kids, or your niece or nephew, or maybe the paper boy. This is probably a fast and cheap way to go, but when you want to use such a site to start making real money, you’re very likely to be met with vacant stares. Does the kid who built it understand sales and marketing, SEO/traffic generation and day-to-day business? Not likely. Even if “the kid” does a good job with the site, it’s probably not built to easily integrate e-commerce, nor does he (or she) know scripting, forms and all the other aspects of online business a good commercial website needs to have. You’ll have little or no control and be out of control at the same time. Not good. And what happens when “the kid” goes off to college?

Every web hosting company offers a “site builder” tool. Heck, if you’re a Mac person you’ve got iWeb right on your computer. These types of tools will give you a decent-looking or even attractive site quickly, though in the “wrong” hands the site will undoubtedly look simplistic if not downright amateurish. It may even “look” like a cheesy template-based website. And in the end, you’ll be handicapped by all kinds of limitations that will prevent you from turning such a site into an effective business platform. We simply don’t have the room to go into all the potential problems here, but there are many. This method puts you in control, but since you’re not a “web-monkey” it’s nigh-on to useless to build a business around this so-called “solution.”

You can hire a “pro,” either from home or from overseas. The home experts are usually expensive. A good commercial website built by a local expert can be many thousands of dollars -- even tens of thousands. And if you go overseas (India, for instance) you can get “the same thing” for a fraction of the price. But now you’re going to have all kinds of communication and cross-cultural headaches. Not to mention this ugly (and strong) possibility... What do you think will happen to your online business when Kumar just up and vanishes one day? India has 1.3 billion people. Even if you hop on a plane to find him, where are you going to start looking?

If you're game, you can go it alone. This is what many entrepreneurs and business people end up doing. They come to believe (wrongly) that it’s the only way to really have control over what you want and need. But this has it’s own major problems. Do you have many months -- if not years -- to learn everything you’ve got to learn? You know... HTML and scripting, SEO and traffic generation, effective copy writing, graphics, the hundred-and-one different ways to market your site, etc., etc., etc. And how do you determine what to learn first? Further, this assumes that you WANT to become a web monkey. Most businesspeople neither have the time nor the interest for this. 

So what is the solution? IS there a solution?

Well, good news. There is a solution! In fact, we Beach Bums consider it the “all-in-one” website solution for most entrepreneurs. You’ve actually got two different ways to go, depending upon what suits you. You can either build a site yourself, under expert guidance and tutelage, or you can have the experts build a site for you to your specifications. Either way, you can’t lose.

In Part 3 of this report, I’ll give you all the info about what we consider to be the very best website building solution.