Looking To Buy a Website

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 its not fulfilling its 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 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 have 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 will see 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 name for 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; its 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 will 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 are 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.

computer adviser buy a website article