Should I optimise my new website for SEO or is the design more important? This is a question that will raise a lively debate but the company you keep will have a large bearing on the answer.

A graphic designer who specialises in visual design will debate that in a high percentage of cases that the website design is the priority of course. And let’s face it without that visually pleasant to the eye design a browser will navigate away from your site within a matter of seconds or so they lead you to believe. But then that raises an all together different debate of how did they find your site in the first instance?

The basic web design criteria or curve goes along the lines of visual design is storyboarded for client ..website design looks excellent let’s go for it. We need some content ok, Take the text from our existing old site…..website goes live and time passes but no visitors!

And then even more time passes by until eventually perhaps months and sometimes years later the situation is either so critical or the company are having to spend out on adwords that finally a search engine optimisation company gets called in or the sales manager starts to question the lack of inbound enquiries from the web, and before you know it you are investing in a web marketing strategy to try and achieve some search engine results.

Is this really the best way to go? The thousands of website owners that have followed this exact or similar path will certainly argue that it most definitely is not as this hope and pray web development criteria delays any websites success by unacceptable periods of time, and even more frightening  results in thousands in lost profit, turnover and ongoing prospect capture.

The search engines don’t care about what the site looks like but with no attention to SEO so often this initial chance to make the best impact when the site first gets indexed is totally wasted, if all the search engines find is a badly optimised site with little regard paid to any SEM requirements or keyword capture.

With only a little extra investment spent on pre development SEO ,for example keyword research and optimisation gives an worthy return on investment as invariably initial indexing is bound to achieve a far better search engine ranking from the beginning and it has been known for pre-optimised websites to hit a page one result straight away.

To find out more about search engine optimisation visit SEO Services Southampton .

In the cut and thrust, ever competitive market that is web design, there is always a good deal to be had. This is especially the case in the current financial climate as the recession has meant that many people are “tightening their belts” so to speak. The web design service industry has felt the full force of the credit crunch in the same way that many other business sectors have. As a consumer you can turn this to your own advantage by ensuring that as well as having a website designed and built that you also have six months of web promotion thrown in for free.

Now I am not a web designer; I actually run stuttering cure speech courses here in the UK and I also help people who have a low self-esteem to be able to increase self-confidence.

Now there may be a number of you; the readers of this article, that believe that to request a free website promotion service to go with the web design is some what cheeky. I would have to agree with you however it has to be worth a go – we are in a recession after all.

The example of buying a car is some what similar; my dad went through this experience only a few weeks ago. He had read about how badly the car dealers are doing and decided to bag himself a bargain. He knew the car he wanted and stated that he was only willing to pay a certain price, a price which was well below the car dealer’s asking price. He went around a number of car garages and put in his offer, eight of the dealerships turned down his offer but the ninth accepted it.

What I am saying is that when you make these requests a lot of web designers will turn you down but there will be at least one that will accept. It is important to ensure however that the person who accepts to build you a website and is happy to throw in some web promotion for free is capable of producing the goods and isn’t just some fly by night novice.

OK, so you have come round to the idea that you need an internet prescence. You have started to come to terms that the internet is the future of advertising. The old favourites of paper based business directories, newspaper adverts and media advertising may soon be a thing of the past. We all have to move with the times if we are to continue to succeed.

The scary thing for many new webmasters is all of the initial costs of setting up a website. I remember all too well just how expensive it was around ten years ago when I had my first website designed and built. It was based on the subject of speech therapy for stammering and I was investing in this new site at a time when I did not have a great deal of money. I have to say that it has proven to be one of the best investments that I have ever made. The website certainly enabled a lot of people to find out about the stuttering therapy service that I offer.

The initial costs of setting up a website include paying for the design, the domain and the web hosting. Then there are the ongoing costs of web promotion; there is of course no point in having a top notch website if nobody ever visits it.

So how can we ensure that we receive a web design service at an affordable price? Just like it is in other forms of business it is not so much what you know but who you know. It is prudent to ask people that you know if they are aware of any web designers. This way you may be able to secure a deal on “mates rates”.

A second idea is to search for freelance web designers rather than going to a web design agency. Many up and coming web designers start up on their own on a self-employed basis and are normally happy to offer a discount whilst they are building up their portfolio.