Normally, if you want a professionally designed, custom-built website for your new virtual assistant business, you should be prepared to spend at least a few hundred dollars.

But, all that can change if you know where to find the best deals and the best designs for the lowest price.

First, it costs more to have a brick-and-mortar company design a website for you. Have you seen those newspaper ads that offer a 5-page website for $500? These are probably companies with physical locations. They have to charge more simply to pay for their overhead: office rent, designers' wages, advertising costs and so on.

Therefore, it would be wise to use a virtual assistant (VA) instead! As you already know, VAs often work from home so they do not have high operating costs like a big company does. On the other hand, a VA will be able to design images with quality similar to (or better than!) those of designers from big companies.

However, choose your VA with care. The best way to find the right VA for your project would be to go to visit the website of a VA association. There you can post your RFP (request for proposal) and have hundreds of talented VAs bid on your project, so you will get the best deal. You will also be able to choose your designer based on her experience, past transactions and client testimonials, so your value for money is secured.

Another route you can take is to purchase the Virtual Business Startup System, created by Tawnya Sutherland. It comes with several beautiful, easy to use templates, perfectly suited for a new VA. The templates are easy to edit wth the help of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs such as Microsoft Frontpage, Macromedia Dreamweaver and so on.

When it comes to building a website you need to build it with one thing in mind and that is your visitors. Your website needs to be structured in a way that makes sense to those that visit it.

While visiting your website if they become confused they will merely hit the back button and you will be left with nothing. Your site needs to make sense and as a consequence you need to lay out the content of the site in a clear concise manner.

Avoid clutter and make sure that your navigational structure is easy to follow so that they can find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Structure it in a way that they will follow the path that you desire them to follow.

Not only do you need to cater to your human visitors but you also need to take care of your robotic visitors. You want to ensure that the search engine spiders can read and understand the content on your site.

This will enable your site to become indexed within the search engines faster for your desired keywords. To ensure this happens you need to focus on relevancy as this will help all your visitors.

To conclude search for things that you like using the search engines and make note of the sites that you find are helpful in providing the information that you are looking for then use this as an example. This will help you stay focused and provide a good site with good layout and content for your visitors.

What do you think is the most important aspect of a website? Let me put the question the other way around. When you go online and visit websites what do you look for? The first thing you want is information. This helps us to make decisions.

Before you buy a car for example you want to know what the safety ratings are and how many miles per gallon it gets. Then you may want to compare it to other cars in that category. All this information is provided through content.

Good content on a site helps you to make decisions and when you experience this you feel you are getting results. As a consequence of this credibility develops and you will use this website as a reference guide which means you may visit it again.

This makes sense right? It's funny because often the secrets to success lie right in front of our eyes. Many times we tend to look elsewhere rather than our own actions for answers. Good content will not only benefit your site visitors but it will also help you climb the ranks in the search engines.

So when you create a website you want to build it in a way that it can provide good content. Good content is brought about by good research. Research is key as this will help you to put a solid foundation in place.

Good content will provide good advertising opportunities and your recommendations will have credibility which will lead to sales - either of your own product or somebody else's.

While all this may seem a little over your head at this point it will all become clear as you work your way through it. Start with a subject you like and start researching niches relative to it. Then you will be focused and in a far better position to build a money making website.

To learn how to put all this together select any of the following links.