Buy A Web Site
I've just been searching the web looking to buy a web site and I have to say that it's not as easy as I thought it would be. I found quite a lot of web designer sites that are happy to build a web site for you to your specifications and charge you a lot of money for doing it. I also found plenty of sites offering web site design templates. It isn't so easy to find ready built web sites at a reasonable cost. Sites that you can upload straight to your web host or even sites that are already on line and operating.I did come across a few places on ebay where I could buy a web site though. There was a nice looking casino web site that you can buy for $5000 or a dating script for $50. I suspect that the $50 script would require some skill in the installation and maintenance area. I have to say that I was tempted by both of these offers but it is very difficult to determine what exactly you will be getting when buying web sites like this so I declined the offers.
Be very very careful if you are going to buy a web site. If you buy a cheap package that you upload to your web server then at the very least you must expect that it will be identical to hundreds of other sites because their owners bought the same cheap web site that you did. Do your research on the vendor. If you are buying from ebay then check out their feedback and email the seller to ask some questions, this is often more revealing than most other methods.
If you are lucky you can buy a web site at a bargain price on ebay and you will get a well-crafted site but don't pay too much for it because quality isn't guaranteed and it's very difficult to tell before you actually see the code itself. Make sure that the seller has a good guarantee and refund policy so that you can return the product if it doesn't fit your requirements.
In general I would not advise you to use a ready made web site without extensive modification unless it was made specifically to your requirements and you can guarantee that it has unique content. The search engines don't like duplicate content and they are getting better and better at spotting it.
On the other hand, buying a web site cheaply can give you a place to start from when building your own site. It's usually easier to modify an existing site slightly than it is to create your own from scratch. Make sure that you rewrite the content in your own words to ensure that the search engines see it as unique on the Internet.
If you are buying a web site that is already online then make sure that it actually gets traffic and that it hasn't been banned by the search engines. Many sites are sold right after they have been banned for some malpractice, which means that the site will no longer appear in the search engine listings and consequently you won't get any visitors to the site. If you know what you are doing and you buy a web site that is busy and profitable then this is a perfectly reasonable way to go. It's no different to buying an established business in a store down town. Just remember that this is just like any other business, the overheads might be low but if you want to make money from your web site then you will need to work at it. If you simply leave it alone and ignore it then it will sooner or later fade away.
Buying a web site might be the fastest way to get yourself online but it isn't going to teach you much about how to design web sites. Much of this web site is devoted to showing you how to create a web site from the ground up but before we start to get into HTMl, CSS and web servers we should mention that you can build a web site online without any technical skills at all, well almost none.