If your one of the many people looking
to buy a website, where to do you begin?
There are really 2 choices, either
purchase a ready made one, or create one yourself, this article is based around
purchasing a ready made site, if you choose to create one from scratch, checkout
our other article on this.
There are literally thousands of
websites for sale at the moment, the most popular place to buy a website is
eBay, but before parting with any money there are some points to consider.
Website buying guide checklist
How much does it cost to buy websites ?
What should I get for my money ?
What is the best theme or subject for my site ?
How do I know how good the site is, apart from the seller telling me ?
Which type of site technology is the best ?
How technical do I need to be ?
How much will it cost to buy a website
In terms of cost this is all in relation to two main factors, the amount of
traffic and the amount of money a website earns at present? Around 6 months of
earnings is a fair price for a site. Many people will argue that they have put
time and expense into the site and this should also be reflected in the price,
but this is down to your discretion, after all even if the site has had
thousands spent on it, if it has no traffic or generates no revenue it’s not
fulfilling it’s purpose.
In addition to this there is another
cost which involves paying for the domain name and web space, this involves a
re-occurring charge to the hosting company, and can range from £20 to around
£130 for a top of the range package, find out before purchasing how much this
will cost. Remember you can be tied into a hosting contract for a year.
What should I get for my money When you buy a website you should get a domain
name, make sure you will be getting the one advertised, plus sufficient web
space with a hosting company, make sure you then have full admin access to be
able to make any changes to the site.
What is the best theme or subject
for my site As a rule of thumb, buy a website with a
subject your actually interested in or familiar with, this way it will be easier
to add more content and grow the site yourself
How can we tell if the website is
a good as the seller says sadly many websites are advertised as
established when they have only been up and running a week or two, or they claim
to make thousands or pounds or dollars per month, some even have a screen shot
of earnings proof, which is easy to fake, how much of this can we believe? The seller may be a very
honest person, but there is no way to tell, and after you’ve parted with your
cash, buy a website you sit waiting for the next month and get no hits on the
site.
There are however a number of ways we
can check how good a site actually is to a certain degree,
The first way is to go to the Alexa website, www.alexa.com once here
enter the website address in the search bar and then select Site Ranking in the
drop down box, hit the Go button this will then give you the Alexa ranking the
more popular the site the lower this will be, if the site is under 2 million
this is pretty good, but any established site should show up in here.
Now look to the left and you’ll see the Wayback Machine, click this and you’ll
how it looked when it was created, but more importantly when it was first
created.
Google offer what is called a page rank to sites, this ranges from 0 for new or
struggling sites and increases as sites become more popular, to a maximum of 10.
To be able to see Google page rank go to toolbar.google.com install
this, select the option to allow Google page rank, re-launch your Internet
Browser and you should now see the little green bar at the top, which will
change as you browse different websites, this will then allow if so the page
rank for each website.
The next test is to make sure the
website is indexed within the major search engines, so go to Google, Yahoo and
MSN in turn and enter site:domain namefor example
site:computer-adviser.com this will not only tell you if the site has been
indexed by the search engine, but also how many pages have.
If the seller says the site earns thousands per month and they give you a screen
shot as proof, this really means nothing; it’s very easy to alter images. Many
payment sites such as PayPal or Adsense allow us to setup users who can view
payment details, but cannot change anything, request on of these logins.
One of the most obvious ways to
recognize if a website is any good, is simply the price it is being sold for, if
a website is up for sale for $200 and its makes more than this every month, it
would be throwing away money, and come on no one does this.
Which type of technology is best There are many
website technologies around, we have Windows or Unix platforms, for a normal
static website either will suffice, if the website is using PHP you’ll need
Unix, or ASP is Windows, if using ASP or Unix this will generally mean the
website is a dynamic type, in effect this means that although the website has a
certain look or template, the actual pages do not exist and are built or put
together when someone conducts a search on the site, dynamic websites are much
harder to initially install as they normally have a database backend such as
MySql, but are generally easier to manage than the static type.
How technical do I need to be For most sites very
basic HTML knowledge is all that’s required, for static websites many of the
pages can be changed or added using applications such as FrontPage or
Dreamweaver which are pretty easy to get to grips with. For dynamic websites
most of these have an admin console, once in the console its just a case of
using the consoles interface which is generally point and click.
Notes
once you buy a website ensure that it has actually been transferred into your
name and then change any passwords, so that you’re the only one with access.
If you find a web site for sale
which boasts an income of thousands of dollars per month and yet is not listed
in any of the major search engines, where does all the traffic come from? Walk
away.
Now you know what to look for go and get your site
If you
want to create a professional website from scratch Why buy a website , why not create a
professional website from scratch? too expensive? too technical? with Site Build
it works out much less than you think, they take care of all the technical stuff
leaving you to get on with your content, find out why thousands of people use
Site Build it, don't just create a website create a web business.
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