This debate is played out on these forums approximately weekly, and frankly in my opinion it's a little silly.
For a LOT of small business, what they NEED is a web presence, period. They need to show up in Google and they don't have the foggiest idea how. They NEED for people to be able to google them and get their hours and their phone number. Most small businesses have no need for full powered online stores or even customer logins.
A small restaurant, for example, needs hours, directions, some "about us" fluff, and maybe a menu, or some specials.
This trope that every company needs a $2,000-$20,000 website really burns my biscuits, especially when there are packages out there like Joomla that let you do *almost* everything a $25,000 website will do almost out of the box.
To the OP, yes, there is a market for ~$300 websites. I don't do them that small any more, but it's a fair price for a 3 page site, getting listed in google, and providing a year of hosting for free. Don't bother with HTML. Get familiar with CSS. Play extensively with wordpress.
Personal story time: I do a lot of community service/volunteer work. I'm putting on a massive fund raiser for one of my favorites. One of their board members is married to a graphic designer, and I asked her if he might be interested in tossing us together a logo for the event. She scoffed, saying he'd already donated $8k of services that year. I asked how, she told me that he'd redone their website. I went to it, and it's just a 7 page site, mocked up in photoshop and then sliced to Drupal, but the stupid thing is that all the important info (telephone, hours, programs) are images instead of text, so the whole purpose of a CMS is being negated. Apparently this dude dumps these things out all year long, and he IS charging them for hosting and name, at something like $500/year. Good for him, I guess. Pretty stupid though, if it took more than 8 hours he's an amateur.
