Clean And Simple Design
I detest blinking text, weird colors, banner ads, animated gifs, music that automatically starts playing and movies that take forever to download. Pages should be fairly short and not show off all the strange special effects that are possible.
Modest Cost
It's possible to get good web hosting at a cost of $100/year. My fees for setting up a site will depend very much on how much work the purchaser is willing to do themselves.
Easy To Maintain
The pages on this site are being put together from a number of small files. It's possible to add a button in just one file and have it appear on every page on the site. The actual content for each page is in it's own separate file and you don't really need any more than a simple editor such as Notepad and some very basic knowledge of HTML to put up a new page. The site also relies heavily on CSS which means that details such as font, font size, color and margins can be changed over the entire site by editing just one file.
Dynamic Pages Driven By A Database
The combination of PHP and MySQL is a very powerful one that allows the content of pages to be changed depending on the information retrieved from an online database.
Hosted On A Reliable Server
The best choice for web hosting is a Linux system running Apache as a web server. For a really good site, PHP and MySQL are also necessary. The internet is a very hostile environment these days. There are many systems infected with worms that try to infect other web servers. Fortunately, they are totally harmless to Linux systems.
No In-Your-Face Ads
If you want to put up a site really cheaply (as in free) you can find companies that will do that for you. However, you will have to put up with having their ads on your pages and you will be very limited in what you can do.
Online Ordering
Various levels of online ordering are possible ranging from a form that the user fills out that sends you an email to a complete shopping cart system that can accept credit cards. The price for credit card ordering varies quite a bit. Everybody charges a small fee per transaction and takes a percentage of the sale. Most companies also charge monthly fees. I found one company that doesn't have a monthly fee but their percentage is higher than usual. For someone doing a small amount of business this would be the best deal. Someone doing a lot of business would be better off going with a lower percentage and paying the monthly fees.
User Forums and Other Add-ons
There are a lot of open source packages that can do various things such as provide a guest book, user forums, user modifiable web pages and user photo galleries. No matter what you want to do, there's a good chance that somebody has written software that does it.
Strict Adherence to W3C Standards
Different browsers will display the same web page somewhat differently and sometimes the differences are major. There are many web sites that take great liberties with the W3C standards. These sites may work well in one particular browser but can be badly broken in another browser. Strict adherence to the W3C standards gives the best chance that a site will display properly in most browsers. At the present time, my pages adhere to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS standards. Just click on the W3C icons at the very bottom of the page and you will see that the page validates.
Listing On Google
I can pretty much guarantee to get your site listed on Google. There are companies that promise to list you with 4,658 search engines for a fee. But if you're indexed on Google, you don't really need anything else.
