Website design, SEO etc.
 

We are launching a start-up in spring and I could use some advice.

Budget for the start up is very small, which means I have a hard time going with the big boys for web design and search engine optimization (and marketing, designers etc.).

Doing some things on our own is an option, but web presence is quite important these days (even if we are not selling anything on the internet) and my concern is making our company look "cheap" or "not trustworthy"

If you have dealt with some less expensive yet great designers, web designers, SEO gurus, can you please share your experiences and maybe leave their name?

If you have done things by yourself and they worked too... I'd love know how you went about it. :fullofwin:

Honestly if you don't have a lot of money to spend on a web design AND development (you'll need both) I would suggest using wordpress as a CMS and buying a nice decent theme from a site like Themeforest. You could build one as well or modify the ones you see. I've do quite a bit of work in web development so let me know if you have any questions.

There are a few SEO plugins available with wordpress that will help you with that stuff but you will have to constantly maintain it as well.

Just curious, but what do you plan on budgeting for a designer, developer, and a SEO guru? Also find someone you know you can count or can contact in the future. I've had to help a few friends get things working once things break because they can't contact the original developer.

Get your social media accounts going and start interacting with your target audience while you're creating your site. Don't cross post and do those lame follow me type posts. If you interact properly and actually make meaningful posts while leveraging hashtags you're bound to make a web presence.

I'm a big fan of start ups so good luck!

^ that is the best way to go.

If you don't know much about SEO there's many plugin's that work well. The one I use for my own blog is Yoast. If you have any issues you can PM me and I can probably help you out. Judging by your post your budget isn't huge so my agency can't help but I can refer you to some friends who do freelance work.

Also for SEO, depending on the business it can be extremely difficult or pretty easy to rank at least on the first page.

In terms of SEO, I'd make sure you have a blog section (WordPress) to your website and create yourself a profile on ALL the social networks eg. tumblr, facebook, twitter, linkedin etc...

Create relevant content and engage with your prospect. In terms of what content to write just see what's the trending topic in your niche and get in on the conversation through your blog and/or social outlets. You'll generate a lot of organic traffic and hopefully make conversions.

Edit: Check out Elance, ODesk, vWorker & Freelancer if your looking to hire developers