Unless your business is on a large scale with a high amount of funding for your web project, chances are you are going to have to decide how best to spend a small or limited budget.

The first thing that should be thought out is “What do you want to get out of your web site.” This seems like it would be an obvious forethought, but you would be amazed at how often this very important item is overlooked.

Not only should you have a relative idea of what you want your site to accomplish, but also where you might like it to go in the future, say a few years down the road. Not giving thought to building around the future now, may result in having to completely re-due your site when that future arrives. With a solid idea of what you want now, and down the line with your site budget in hand, you are ready to begin building or having your site built.

You need to figure out how much of your site should be glitz and how much should be functional. All sites need a little glitz, just because no one wants to surf an ugly site. If the graphics are bad, the color combinations give the viewer a headache or the site is a nightmare to navigate, the visitor will just move on to the next site. Too much glitz, though, can eat up your budget before you even get to your content. Also, once you have a solid site foundation, you may be able to build more glitz with the budget appropriation, or down the line when your site yields more productivity.

This is also the place in your new project to start thinking about how search engines are going to perceive and rate your site. This area of the sites development is very crucial and time must be appropriated, not only for the thought, but the coding time that will be involved in making your site as search engine friendly as possible. Truth is, eventually, even if you never officially submit a site for inclusion on a search engine, it will find its way there on its own. Search engine spiders are out on the look for new and changed sites every day and they also look at each other for updates. The key to a good crawl (when a search engine finds, reviews and ranks your site), is in the coding, not necessarily visible to human visitors. As a fact, search engines like Google hardly ever look at the human view of your site, (unless paid). Crawler engines only look at the code behind the page, it finds content and changes there. Even if you submit your site to Google there is no assurance that it will come and look at your site because you ask them to. Yahoo is, on the other hand, not a spider based crawl engine, it is a directory engine. The difference being, that when you submit your site for inclusion to the Yahoo search engine, the site is put in a queue and eventually a human visitor, will come look your site over, so here is where ascetics count. It is from this visit that your site gets its initial ranking. In this case, look, navigation and spelling are very important.

There are many tips and tricks to “Getting" Google to look and rank your site better, but I will leave you to research these avenues as it is a separate issue from what is being covered here. One last note about search engine ranking; don’t be lured in by those promising to get your site listed on thousands of search engines for a fee. They will do nothing more then list your site on a bunch of free list engines (which of course you can also do yourself for free) that in many cases will not be for the product or services you are trying to promote. This may even harm your site when reviewed by engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Use the items you already have on hand such as your logo. Most all businesses have a designed logo for business cards and such. You should have or be able to get this graphic in a gif, jpg or bmp format from your printer. (If you have used some prefab graphic from your printer, you may or may not be able to get a copy, it can’t hurt to ask, but more times then not the answer for one reason or another will be no.) If you do need to create a cheap logo, there are many sites out there that do so for free or for a small fee, such as www.cooltext.com (Free text graphics). By doing this part yourself, you save paying someone else to do it for you, and you end up with about the same quality of graphic.

A site on a limited or fixed budget should have enough glitz to show the site to be ok to the senses and be recognizable as your business or organization, but most of your dollars should concentrate on content and navigation. If you have a product you know people are going to hit your site for, then you also know they will stay no mater what the site looks like, yet very few actually have that luxury.

Your dollars in this case are best spent first, by making it easy to find what your visitor is looking for. Whether it is information or items for sale, they won’t look long if they can’t find it right away. One good way of accomplishing this is to have a search site option that is easily found and useable. Here too, you can find free ones out there on the web. One you might try is www.freefind.com.

As a rule, most visitors hit a site and spend less then a minute deciding if it is someplace they want to stay, it is this short time frame that you have to catch their attention and lock them into wanting to see more. This moment comes to pass when the visitor comes to the first page. It is naturally then one of the first places you should focus on, in other words what glitz you have should be displayed here in one form or another.

It is important to note that there must be a balance here… your existing customers are going to want that look and feel they get when dealing with you on a first hand basis, while new visitors who don’t know who you are, must find a reason to stay, so your first page should also be appealing to them.

If you keep to a course once you set it, you should be able to end up with a good site that accomplishes what you want it to do with out going over budget. A little thought before trying this, and not liking it, so then trying something else, goes a long way in reducing coding time for whomever you have doing the job for you.

Last, but not least, if your site is, or is going to be, a major part of your business, then it must be done right or it is best to not have one at all. If it is too much to do in-house or personally, you should at the very least look into a consultant. The money spent on a consultant or web design person or firm, is well spent if you need top results. We here at Innovative Evolutions would be glad to assist your efforts in any way possible; just send us an email to sales@innovative-evolutions.com or use the online form found on our site at www.innovative-evolutions.com.

The links found in this article are not endorsements of any kind, they are just free web services that we know about and have actually used at one point or another. They are meant to be only a starting point to show what type of stuff you can find if you look. Use them or find others, we receive no compensation if you follow the links or use the services.

Good luck on your new web project.