A cheap website, or should I say an affordable website, doesn't have to mean a poorly built website without the inclusion of some nice features. There are some website design companies out there who offer extremely good features for a reasonable price, including some of the nice touches that you would expect in a high end package.

What Features Should I Expect In My Budget Website?

Here are 10 features that I would expect even a budget price website package to contain:

1. A CSS driven design with external CSS files. In simple terms, this is a far more convenient way of managing the design and layout on a site-wide basis.

2. Website code that validates to W3C standards. With the code passing validation the search engine crawlers will have a much happier time crawling and therefore indexing your website.

3. All meta tags should be completed and the extremely important description tag on every page should contain a page specific description, not a site wide generic description that is repeated time and time again on every page.

4. The title tag on every page should be completed incorporating the important keywords for that particular page. Once again, the title tag should not be one generic tag that is repeated throughout the site but page specific

5. Of course you will want your new website to have a modern, fresh looking layout that is uncluttered and extremely easy to navigate. For some excellent site examples, view some web 2.0 sites as they are often particularly well designed, minimalistic and easily navigated.

6. Do you have a robots.text file? Is there going to be one included in your website build or will this be left out? This is an extremely important file to have on your server as it tells search engine robots which files they are permitted to index, and which ones they are not.

7. What about a sitemap? A sitemap.xml file which can be submitted to Google in the Google Webmasters panel by your website builders and is extremely important as it helps your site to get quickly indexed by the search engines.

8. Will you have an interactive contact form? Will your website company incorporate a contact form into your site as part of your agreed, affordable package price, or will this become an additional charge?

9. How will your images be displayed on your new budget website? Will you have an impressive lightbox style gallery or will you just be permitted to have a few images throughout the whole site.

10. And whilst we are on the images, will you have to provide all your own images or will your web design company be able to provide you with some stock images in the event that you do not have any?

So there it is. 10 important features that in my opinion every website, including budget websites, should have incorporated in them. If your web design brief does not appear to include these features, ask your design company whether they will be present, if not, maybe you should consider an alternative design company to build your website for you.