smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

Your first step is to research your idea and market carefully, just as you would with any other business idea. The actual process of setting up on the internet is quite straightforward and don't be put off by the jargon. You will need an address for your site, someone to host your site (an internet service provider) and someone to design the site (unless you have such skills yourself). There are some sites specialising in helping small businesses to produce their own web sites; check them out to see if they offer anything more than putting it together yourself.

The cost for registering an address can vary greatly depending on what you are looking for and which firm you register through. It is thus essential to shop around at this stage of the process. The charge for hosting the site depends on what you want the ISP to do for you, but shouldn't be more than about £1,000 a year for a simple site. How expensive your site would be to design would be entirely dependent upon the complexity of your idea, but could range from £2,000 - £3,000, up to £1 million.

If you want to see goods from your site and to enable people to buy on-line, your site would need to be run on a secure server - and this can put up the cost. You would also need to use a credit card authorisation company such as World Pay (www.worldpay.co.uk; 0870 7427001) or Barclays Merchant Services (www.barclaycardmerchantservices.co.uk). To keep things simple for a while when you are starting up, you could get people to pay off-line by printing off the form and sending you a cheque or credit card form.