Normally, if you want a professionally designed, custom-built website for your new virtual assistant business, you should be prepared to spend at least a few hundred dollars.

But, all that can change if you know where to find the best deals and the best designs for the lowest price.

First, it costs more to have a brick-and-mortar company design a website for you. Have you seen those newspaper ads that offer a 5-page website for $500? These are probably companies with physical locations. They have to charge more simply to pay for their overhead: office rent, designers' wages, advertising costs and so on.

Therefore, it would be wise to use a virtual assistant (VA) instead! As you already know, VAs often work from home so they do not have high operating costs like a big company does. On the other hand, a VA will be able to design images with quality similar to (or better than!) those of designers from big companies.

However, choose your VA with care. The best way to find the right VA for your project would be to go to visit the website of a VA association. There you can post your RFP (request for proposal) and have hundreds of talented VAs bid on your project, so you will get the best deal. You will also be able to choose your designer based on her experience, past transactions and client testimonials, so your value for money is secured.

Another route you can take is to purchase the Virtual Business Startup System, created by Tawnya Sutherland. It comes with several beautiful, easy to use templates, perfectly suited for a new VA. The templates are easy to edit wth the help of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs such as Microsoft Frontpage, Macromedia Dreamweaver and so on.