A mail-order shoe store might want to branch out, putting its catalog online, and encouraging current customers to visit the store. A Web site that is well-designed, and properly promoted, can be very effective. The cost of setting up a Web site varies greatly. Because it's such a new medium, most business owners have little idea of what a Web site should cost, and even less idea of how much work it takes to set up a Web site. Consequently companies creating Web sites charge rates that range from the very fair to the completely ridiculous.
Web sites can be very affordable, though.
Perhaps the easiest to use authoring program is Microsoft FrontPage. Not only does it allow the user to create Web pages, but also to build forms. Unfortunately FrontPage is the only program that makes creating such forms easy in most cases. FrontPage, on the other hand, is already set up to work on hundreds of Web-hosting company's servers, so generally there's no additional work to be done to make forms created in FrontPage function. Low-cost Web sites don't have to appear to be cheap.