I'd be wary of spending to much money on the actual design of the site. Spend the money researching & developing the structure and backend of the site so that it works well for your users & is optimized for the search engines.
Also, I think links are much more important that the article makes them out to be. Yes, content is very important, but if you don't have as many quality links as your competitors, good luck trying to compete with them.
Getting quality links is of course the difficult part of
SEO - and the most expensive.