Web design is fairly easy. I think that the HTML language itself is not more difficult to learn than most HTML editors.
Check out Web Pages That Suck. Whether you design yourself, or get it done by a contractor, this is a useful guide on not screwing up. And it is entertaining.
It's not hard to "roll your own." My website has gone through several revisions, and with good results for my business. I started by purchasing a web template and MS FrontPage for editing the content. I now have a "more expensive" template and use MS Expressions as editor. I've looked at using freelance web designers, but haven't needed to make that jump yet. I run my own site through a hosting service. Everything costs just a couple hundred $$ per year. It's cheaper than 4-color brochures and gets wider coverage.
TygerDawg
Blue Technik LLC
Virtuoso Robotics Engineering
Google for "free web template" (without quotes) and you'll get a ton of hits. Plenty of ready-to-go templates out there at no cost other than the bandwidth to transfer them to your system... edit them in any text editor to change links, content, etc. Depending upon your field, you may not find one with a background you like, but either hack something together yourself or pay a graphic artist to make one to fit your template... it would be a lot cheaper than having someone create your entire site.
If you like to sit in front of your computer and tinker around, it can be a good project on weekends. I did mine on weekends but it is still a work in progress (
Link services has been "outlawed" by Google for quite a few years now... they realize exactly what those pages are for and ban them. If your page ends up on one (a page linked me without my permission for a few months), you go down in rank quite significantly.
No, actually, link services are not outlawed. Per Google's webmaster guidelines "Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guideline and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results." Link analysis is how the search engines determine organic rankings. The quantity and the quality of links tell the engines how relevant your website is for a specific search request. So buying links and trying to pay you way to the top is against the guidelines but building natural, legitimate links from high authority websites is recommended.
If you want to build a website that generates a lot of high quality links, spend your time building valuable content on your website and promote it. If the content is valuable, people will share it and create links.
It's irrelevant on whether the link was paid for or not, what matters is if the link pages offer no value other than an entire page of links in an attempt to game the system. I have no idea what Radium does, but it's obviously not a link page, which was what the original comment was about. Link pages are against Google's TOS and will affect your page rankings, the same as the purchased links mentioned in your quote.
