If you are a business looking to have a website developed, you may be a little shocked at the costs which can be involved, especially in more complex sites. You may be tempted to choose one of the cheaper, off the shelf website packages that allows you to create your own website with little or no programming experience. There is a huge number of companies that offer this service and they range in price. Before committing to a monthly fee or upfront cost for your website it is important to question why they are so much cheaper. Often these types of services allow you to pick from a number of different templates. You then can upload your logo, content and possibly add a contact form but essentially you will be left with a site that looks very similar to many others out there and have little control over what you can do to it.
When it comes to marketing you need to be able to develop a site in such a way that it is search engine friendly (using SEO techniques). Some of these software packages that allow you to build your own site make SEO very hard if not impossibly and therefore at the end you are left with a mediocre site that may look ok but does not rank well on the search engines such as Google or Bing.