Hi.

I had a website which I did myself through Microsoft Office Live. Unfortunately, this has now been shut down and replaced with something much too complicated for a freelance musician and much more costly - it seems to be aimed at small businesses really.

I was wondering what I should be paying for a website if I have one done professionally. I have recently been offered one for ?100 but when I looked into it, it meant ?100 per year! Any advice?

I paid for my website and it hasn't returned the amount I put into it!

Pop1and1.co.uk looks pretty good and they have templete you can design yourself. I probably wouldn't pay unless it's along term investment.

Knowing what your using the website for ie reference point / generating more pupils ect....

You could set one up free of charge using Wordpress.com. They are mainly designed for blogs, but you can add as many pages as you like and it's easy to do. I did one for the PTA at my daughter's school and just started very simply, adding more features as I got the hang of it. There are lots of templates and they are well designed.

You would get a website address something like www.juliemarie.wordpress.com but it would cost you nothing. If you want a more personalised address I believe there's a yearly charge.

If you want cheap and cheerful, you can use a free web site template such as Google and just pay for a domain name - which woudl be a few pounds (probably less than 5) a year. I put this together at the weekend for the Chester event, but haven't bothered with paying for a domain name

If it's covering domain name, hosting, email and website design, plus ongoing maintainance and technical support, then ?100/year is cheap. Worryingly cheap! For a decent service, I'd expect to pay more, because you're paying for a specialist's time (think of how little actual time with one of us ?100 buys...)

A decent website, even if built using Wordpress or similar, and a presence in things such as Google Places for Business, can indeed bring in a lot of business. I'd hardly have any pupils otherwise!

My website is built using WordPress and cost about ?125 to design and build, with hosting currently ?4.99 a month. As it's built in WP, I can easily maintain and update it myself, and my web designer's always on hand to advise. It was 100% money well spent; it's probably paid for itself several times over in the past year.

That said, you can get a really decent free website with WP and it's very easy to use.

I got mine from Zen.co.uk - I pay ?5 a month for hosting. plus ?12 or thereabouts for two years of domain name, and the Zen hosting comes with free web building software and so I built my own website for free (it was easy). I used Soho Launch to build it - it's one of a range of free software that comes with the Zen website.