-By Joseph Tarnowski

When you're ready to expand your brand to the Web, there's always the question of whether to build an online store from the ground up yourself, or to have it hosted by a third-party vendor.

If you ask Chris Beykirch, owner of Logan, Utah-based kitchen supply store Love to Cook! at Kitchen Kneads, the answer is, both.

"Retailers should use a third-party vendor in the beginning, for their first attempts at building a Web site," he says. "There are no startup costs, and it makes you look a lot bigger than you are; and it's a great learning experience. You can learn what online tools are right for your business, so you are better prepared to do it on your own later on. Plus, you have so many other things to do that it's not worth investing in a custom Web site at first."

And that's just what he did, teaming up with Marina Del Ray, Calif.-based Cooking.com. Cooking.com through his membership with Gourmet Catalog, an online marketplace for the kitchen, operates six branded Web sites, including www.Cooking.com, www.StarbucksStore.com and www.PillsburyStore.com, and also designs, hosts, fulfills and manages retailers' online stores as part of a service it calls "Powered by Cooking.com."

"There is no cost unless you sell something, and if you do sell something, they just take a commission," says Beykirch.

Over time, however, Love to Cook did quite a bit of business from its online store, www.Luvtocook.com -- enough to eventually invest in building its own Web site.

Aside from the Cooking.com-hosted site providing the funding for his new venture, it also provided the education and strategic insights Beykirch needed to go it alone. "When you build a custom Web site, it's important that it is well-thought-out beforehand," he says. "You have to think about the future expansion of it, and then you have to make sure you find somebody you trust to build it. The kid around the block whose parents are your customers is probably not going to be able to do it for you. You want somebody who is reputable, who will be accountable for their work, and who will be able to scale with you as you grow."

They should be adaptable, too, able to handle a retailer's changing needs, such as, for example, when Beykirch realized after building his site that his customers couldn't register for cooking classes inside the store.

"We wanted to be able to register people in the store as well as online," says Beykirch. "So we went back to the vendor and they were able to integrate that functionality into the site. Now, we can register people in the store or on the Web site, and it all goes into one database."

It took only six months to develop the site, since Beykirch already had a lot of the ideas in-house on paper. Once he found a programmer, he was ready to go.

Probably the chief drawback of building your own site, says Beykirch, is cost. "Custom Web sites are expensive," he notes. "If it's not expensive, it's probably not worth it. And you are always putting money into it to make it better, because technology is always changing."

Luvtocook.com is content-rich and features recipes, chef biographies, and a page of useful measurements -- Beykirch wants the site to provide as much information as possible for visitors.

It also has a wedding registry -- a very important feature for Beykirch. But he does it a little differently than typical registries. Instead of purchasing actual products, users can purchase store credits in $5 increments toward a couple's wedding. All of these credits are added up and turned into an in-store gift certificate for the bride and groom.

"Couples love it because it doesn't expire, they get an extra discount on it, and they can do their own shopping in the store," says Beykirch. "Plus, a bride can register in 10 minutes, instead of walking around the store with a scanner for six hours."

One of the main challenges Beykirch found in building his own Web site, and one he still wrestles with, is getting product on it, as is evidenced by the couple of product categories online that are still empty. It's not a technical challenge, but one of tediousness. "It takes time, it's hard work and it's detail-oriented, and not too many people can handle all three of those complications," he says. "We don't use developers to load up products, just part-time people [whom] we hire as needed."

It's a minor issue, compared to the benefits of having an online presence he can call his own -- one that he can grow and expand in the same way his business does.