Like most professions this area has multitudes of options and multitudes of "hacks" in it.
I've seen people get skun, get sites that look a million dollars and even 3 years later dont rank on Google.
There's better ways of doing things, those who are at the forefront of web development and SEO dont work for nothing and do bugger all for free.
In comparison to other forms of advertising one must say why SCAB OUT on something this inexpensive to begin with? Like a home-owner felling a hazard tree many embark upon a website with little idea of the best building methods and results.
I build sites.
I write code through an FTP transfer client called CuteFTP. I write and layout pages using css. My sites come stock SEO'd and all rank 1st page Google with most of them taking out #1 ... you dont get that at many web places.
Why did I do that?
Because of the "hacks" and the rip off pricing out there for web design. Then after paying $2k to a web designer my site sat stagnant and never ranked in Google. Decent help was hard to find so I did courses and took an interest. Like many things people with a passionate interest often find out more and do more than those where it's "just a job".
Within no time my sites ranked well and now hard to beat with heavy competition.
Like felling trees or even climbing them, armchair observers think it's all easy, they think they can do it, perhaps, but in 90% of the cases, no. Like the home-owner who gets injured or smashes stuff the learning curve will be there.
Common mistakes of websites.
1/ Name the site after your business. (I'm guilty of this too but have grown wiser and know better)
2/ Use free hosting without a unique URL
3/ Incorrect hosting choices, for instance, do you host on Linux using Apache or a Windows server?
4/ Too much focus on "bells and whistles". WOW factor, all those great eye candy gizmo's suck bandwidth and take time to load ... click, customer gone elsewhere your site took too long to show up, 3 seconds they say.
5/ No idea of how bots crawl so poor layout and no hierarchical structure
6/ No idea of off site optimisation, hence why some 5 year old sites get beaten by 6 month old sites
7/ Poor coding confusing and delaying bot crawlers
8/ Excessive use of javascript and flash as it's so easy to make drop down menus and little things happen.
9/ Poor choice of keywords and keyword spamming. How often I see 30 keywords in the meta tags, idiots.
10/ No meta tags
11/ No sitemap
12/ No .htaccess file
13/ No robots txt file
14/ Domain and hosting bought together as a "package"
So as you can see there's things to do that aren't even on the web pages themselves. Things to do that 99% of designers dont give a stuff about.
It's a massive learning curve, very hard to teach some-one, and experienced builder and SEO people wont go about revealing too much for nothing.
.com's these days cost $10, careful where you purchase them. Buying hosting and a .com together can and from my experience will get you stuck and frustrated. All those 24/7 offers of help and 30 day refunds sound great ... wait till you try to use them, then realise what really goes on.
I have built many ,many sites now. tweaked a few but to the day can honestly say unlike felling a tree where there's a finite beginning and end with websites it's an ongoing never ending evolution. Sure you can "set and forget", many people have a site and never touch it, stays the same for years. They can get knocked off easily.
The logical thing to do is allow a budget, how much do you wan to invest, what do you expect to get.
In my experience most people have little idea and simply dont follow through, cant write anything and like staring at a blank page get writers block and then give up wasting every-ones time.
I can sit here and say this, lay down the challenge if you like, tree people etc, if you want a website or you want to be #1 in Google I can do it, you name the site you want to knock off and it's done.
Click the links in my sigs to get to me, then email me if you're serious.
