This week: Part 3 in an eight-part series covering:

1. Why a Web site, online marketing, and digital AND print marketing materials are now necessary to successfully market yourself and your business.  

2. What a Web site, online marketing, and marketing materials can, and cannot, do for you.  

3. How you can get a great Web site, and update it often, without going broke.

4. How to cost-effectively create marketing materials for online and print use.

5. How online marketing and social networking sites fit into your overall marketing plan.

6. When to "do it yourself" and when to invest in getting help.

7. Myth busting: "If you build it, they will come."

8. Search Engine Optimization: what's all the buzz about.

Read all the posts here.

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Part 3:  How you can get a great Web site, and update it often, without going broke.

A website is the core of your online marketing. It represents you, it shows your work and gives information about you and your professional life, and even your personal life if you want.

There are many ways to get a website. And just so you know, I'm including blogs as "websites" because many are these days and vice-versa.

Click image to see samples of websites we've done.You can do it yourself, you can get a friend or family member to do it, or you can hire someone to create it for you.  (Got a story about having a friend or family member do your website? Please share it by posting a comment!)

In my opinion, the best way to get a professional, stylish website that will serve you well is to have someone create it for you who is experienced in YOUR field (business, education, art, etc.) and who understands YOUR big picture, your long-term goals, and who has business and marketing experience. It's a critical piece of your marketing, I don't think you should leave it to an amateur. I don't, and you'll learn why as we go along here.

It doesn't have to cost a lot. It does cost something because you don't want a website that looks unprofessional, messy, that's awkward to view, and that doesn't make your work look absolutely stellar. You WILL have to spend SOME money on this. You can't nickle and dime your way to the top, seriously.  

One of the best ways to get a wonderful website at a reasonable cost is to use a template system. There are many out there, some quite simple to quite complex.

Years ago it was all about custom websites, that's all there was, and you can still get a great custom website if you really want it. That means something designed from scratch, from the ground up, by a web designer. Generally, these can cost 3 to 4 times what a customized TEMPLATE site will cost you.

And some of the template systems today are incredible, very flexible, very customizable. They don't look like other people's sites. They end up looking quite unique. And, truthfully, it would cost a small fortune to get a web designer so vastly experienced that they knew everything about art marketing, clean design, SEO, site stability, flash, html, PHP, CSS, all that stuff. For me, I'd rather have a company with a full time staff of experts design the basics so that I have a stable, very functional, constantly updated (on the back end, the code) and then I can go in and make it unique and appropriate for each artist. Much better.

Also, template sites with a good company are much easier to update and keep current than a totally custom site. They all come with a "content editor" - the place you go to update your site that usually looks something like a Word document with buttons to help you format text and insert images. That makes it easier for you, or whomever is helping you with your website, to update it.

Some examples: There are online template systems that cost only about $5/month. You can get a basic website and you'll pay extra for the "bells and whistles" like blogs, galleries, or a lot of customization. But even a very high-end template system (like those designed for professional photographers with thousands of images) will top-out at about $60/month and there is everything in-between. You get a lot for the money.

One thing to remember: when you have a template website, you are renting, or leasing, the template. If you want to move your website somewhere else, all the content of course goes with you. It's yours and you own it. But the template stays put with the company unless they have some provision for you to use the design elsewhere.  Really, it's not a big deal. Most people, when they have a template site with a good company, don't ever need to go elsewhere.

On top of that, you'll want to own our own "domain name" our www.yourname.com (or whatever) and that's only about $10/yr. The biggest expense is creating the site, but with a template system it takes far less time to do that. That's where the big savings come in.

Have YOU tried a template system for a web site? How'd you like it?

All my best to you and yours,