The Myth: You may have seen advertisements offering to create a free website for your company. To reduce skepticism, they openly tell you that your webpages will be created as part of a training program. They even claim guaranteed satisfaction. It sounds like a great deal, but…

The Truth: The first catch is that you must put your webpages on their webservers, usually at a cost far greater than industry standard. Most businesses need not spend more than about $20 per month on a webserver, make sure this lines up with their offering. They may also refuse to refund any money if you wish to cancel this service, so look before you leap.

The second catch is that these companies will usually make the first four pages of your webpage for free, and since almost all webpages require more than four pages, you'll be digging into your wallet soon enough.

The third catch is that, as advertised, these webpages are being created by students. Usually students who have little or no experience with computers or webpage design prior to the one month course which involves creating your webpage. So don't expect a professional quality product, and what exactly are you going to get back from the guaranteed satisfaction, after all, you didn't pay them anything to build your webpage.

The fourth catch is that the scheduling of your webpage creation is up to them, and while you paid money up front for the 6 or 12 month webserver rental, you may not have a webpage to put on it for 6 months. Again, since you're technically not paying for the creation of the webpage, you don't have any leverage on completion date of your webpage.

The bottom line is that you will be much better off hiring any number of professional website creation companies to build your company's website. Your website will look professional, the webserver won't cost you an arm and a leg, and if you're not satisfied with your webpage, you can refuse payment until your desires are met. Many website creation companies will also offer a large scale of supporting services such as internet consultation, hardware and networking installation, business e-mail account setup, and much more.

The Myth: You can save your money by creating your own webpages using any number of webpage creation programs, such as Pagemill, Frontpage, or Composer.

The Truth: It is true that these Webpage creation programs cost very little when compared to paying someone else to build your website, but the same could be said concerning the price of tools compared to paying someone to fix your car. Unless you are very skilled with a computer, understand some programming, and have lots and lots of free time on your hands, its unlikely that you will be happy with the results of trying to build your own webpage.

You can use Frontpage themes to quickly and relatively easily create a webpage, however, it will not be unique, and you might be very disappointed when see other webpages out there that look exactly like yours. Many net-surfers will also immediately recognize your webpage as a Frontpage theme, and will assume that your business is small potatoes.

Another large portion of any webpage is its graphical content. None of these programs will help you create and edit the images that bring a webpage to life. Working with graphics is a skill entirely separate from webpage manipulation, and requires more software and more time to learn how to use. A couple hundred more dollars will give you the software to help you do this, but it will take a lot more time before you're proficient in its use.

Once you have become proficient in HTML and graphics creation, you may still need to incorporate scripts into your website. Many scripts are written in Java, Javascript, Perl, and more. Treading into these areas without programming knowledge is folly. More books, maybe a course or two, and you're ready to tackle these areas as well.