I’m often asked by small businesses and freelancers about designing their blog for $500-800. The sites we normally work on start at $30K but I’d still like to recommend some best practices for people getting started on a shoestring. Advice if you only have $500 to spend?

@boxcarmarketing depends on what you are offering them and your expectations of profit. Are you including the domain, setting it up? Setting up email addresses? Still you can offer a lot, it really doesn’t take anything but a little bit of time to give them huge value.

Thanks @kristi-hines & @iamconsulting I agree that good design, even picking a good, adaptable theme is the place to start. 

@glengorham I’m thinking of mostly passing people on to independent designers or wordpress developers as it’s not business that I want to handle. I do want to give steer people in the right direction though. 
You’re right that even buying the domain and setting it up is a chore for some people just starting. 

@boxcarmarketing

Depending on how fancy or simple you want it, blogs will vary.  For my company website, we spent some time and money hiring a web developer and buying themes.  However, I also run a separate blog that uses little to no money.  If you start a blog on wordpress, blogger, blogspot, tumblr, and so on, it can be cheap if you are willing to have it simple.  Obviously, if you want the domain name or a better theme, it is going to get more expensive.  Yet, it still going to be cheap.

Tweet @GoOmnibeat

Send them my way Monique. I’ve been building Wordpress sites for small business for some time now right in that price range and it’s been an nice addition to my business. There are a lot of small businesses out there that need websites they can manage themselves and can’t afford the price of a large design agency.

The biggest expense is in the content. If they know what they want to put on the page, than it doesn’t take all that much to get them going. If they need copy writing and graphics that’s where the expense can come in.

With small businesses I set them up, provide a nice design, provide a little training and they are off and running. The great thing about Wordpress, with a little bit of code up your sleeve, a site can look very professional right out of the box, is easily optimized for SEO and can be managed by the end user.  

@glengorham It’s not very original but I offer a service that includeds The domain name, hosting & set up of a WordPress site all for just $70 a year.  I don’t add content but I have a quick 30min video for my clients on how to add pages, posts and information on plugin’s.  I also provide my customers with a 40% discount on all printing needs.  I would love to help where I can!
And I am available to my customers by phone
http://www.ehostwebsite.com

@djkyle @jasonwiser Thanks for the introductions!

As I always tell my clients “use your words”  when writing a page about widgets don’t just show a picture of a widget and say we  build that!  the search engines have no idea what “That” is  however if you name your page Widget and alt tag your widget then describe your widget in glorious descriptive words in a natural way your site will begin to rank with good search results. 
This process takes time you can’t create a page in just 5 min.  It can take some time to do it the right way. 
Example:
I manage a local job posting site and my client thought he could just send over a job description and I could create a page about the job opening (and most would do just that)  on the other hand I created a page just for the job posting then created a listing for that job posting under a page titled by category (let’s say warehouse supervisor) then made sure to create a link on the category page with link by title and city (again let’s say warehouse supervisor job in Bakersfield) to the job description. 
This is just the beginning of the SEO process, There is the meta title, meta description,  Image alt tag, url, original content.  This is what you need to do or pay someone who understands this is as important as the posting.

Anyway sorry to rant on and on but you can see and good content is more that just a few words!