I think every website is a fluid thing,... once you're past this initial design phase don't forget to keep going back and changing/updating it. There's nothing worse than an out of date website,... and regular updates help your ranking on the search engines.
Defo work on the meta & description tags,.. and optimise the images for quicker loading (Download a trial of Macromedia Fireworks for this!)
My website is in my profile,... built from a template so I can't take all the credit!