If you’ve ever thought about starting a new website, chances are you have looked into hiring a professional designer. A lot of design firms charge extremely high rates for simple websites, and in many cases there are additional costs for different types of functionality. With design firms charging such high rates, it’s hard to imagine getting a website off the ground on a budget, but it can definitely be done.

Setting up a site using WordPress is actually fairly simple. If you’re comfortable with some light HTML, chances are you could do it yourself, as long as you’re not looking for anything too complicated. Most hosting providers offer an automatic install of WordPress, and once it’s installed, all you really need to do is make a few simple tweaks to the theme to get it looking the way you want it to. If you’d like to add a little bit of additional functionality to your site, there are many plugins and widgets available for WordPress that allow you to do a wide variety of things. There are some plugins to help with SEO optimization, some to add things like polls to your site, and some to allow you to embed a podcast right into a post. Some of them require a little more effort to set up than others, but if you’re on a tight budget it might be worth the time.

If design firm prices don’t fit in your budget, and you don’t feel like you could learn to set up a site on your own, there’s a third option. Sites like elance.com let you connect with many freelance designers. Freelancers can often product the same quality work that a large firm would deliver, but given that their operating cost is significantly lower, you’ll get a much better price out of them. It’s important to go through a site like elance rather than just searching Craigslist for a freelancer. Elance, and other sites like it let you see a designer’s profile, along with reviews of their work. That way, you can be sure you’re getting a designer that can handle your site, and won’t leave you high and dry if there’s a problem.

Don’t be discouraged by the prices big design firms offer. If you take the time to do a little work with your site yourself, or if you can find a freelancer that suits your budget, your site can become a reality, even if your budget is tight.

One of the main goals  of your business is to get your website to rank as high as possible. The reason being, if you have a higher ranking website, the more eyeballs that view it, the more revenue and business (or philantropy) you can provide for your visitors. The point of creating a website isn’t to have it sit idle and without viewers, but to get as large as the owner wants it to be. That is where ranking high in search engines is really going to help. Statistics show something like 40% of the users on search engines like Google click on the first link available, your goal is to be that site.

Ranking systems within the popular search engines used more often by browsing individuals can either give you an advantage or a disadvantage. If you are not ranked higher in these listings, then you get less exposure and that is bad when your website depends on exposure from people who want to see what you provide on your website. It is not impossible to get a top ten ranking on search engines and it does not take too much to get there if you know the simple tricks to use.

There is a wide variety of things you could do to help improve your search engine ranking. The most important thing that needs to be done is having the website optimized for search engine indexing. This optimization could be simple things like providing the necessary tags, having content that is tailored to the target audience and more. This can be done by yourself or you could hire professionals to do it for a fee. Either way, it helps to improve ranking and promotes more traffic to the websites which are being optimized.

The next option is to look into blogs and social media for link purposes. The way that some of the goliath search engines work best is by having back links to the original source. This means that the more times that a link is traceable back to the website that originates to some content or provides a simple link to the main page of the website, the more times it will show up in the search engine when searched. Many search engines combine the weight of all of the links towards the original and provide higher rankings when searched. This does take time, but is fairly worth the effort to increase ranking on search engine sites.