Professional Looking Design

Professional Looking Design

It is worth it to pay someone to make a professional looking design for your site. It is very affordable easy to use a default blog template and pay a logo designer $50-$200 to design a logo for you. My original SEO Book site design was not overly simplistic because I am a minimalist; it was overly simplistic because I am a bad designer. For the first two years it was a default Movable Type template with a $99 logo at the top. I eventually paid a few thousand dollars to get a new, crisp, clean design.

It is very easy to find shoddy logo design, but there are some good ones. Recently I purchased logos from The Logo Company for $150 each. A few times I have been disappointed, but some of their logos came out better than expected. My SEO Book logo was created by EZY Logo, a now defunct company that had great product but terrible customer support. If you need an exceptionally cheap logo you may want to run a contest at a forum or try to buy a logo from a site like Elance.

I purchased AAA logo design software for $50. I think it is fun to play with, but if you are not graphically inclined, you probably will want to pay someone else to design your logo. Buying a good original logo is an exceptionally cheap one-time investment.

Professional Looking Design (Part 2)

Making a site accessible, usable, and professional looking might cost you $10,000 or more. If you are low on funds, it might make more sense to spend that money on brand building and marketing, but if you want designers and the like to link at your site it is much easier to get links if your site looks professional.

Off the start I did not believe that coding errors or design mattered that much, but if you want technical sites to link to you, then your site has to pass the sniff test. That consideration is much more important if you write a tech blog than if you run a fairly static e-commerce site.