Boss pedals are pretty much the mainstay as far as quality of sound versus price and reputation. Pretty much every big time player uses atleast one Boss pedal... here is a thread from way back that has a link to a .pdf file that gives a killer amount of information about pedals... it only deals with the Boss products but most of the info is universal... You can learn a ton from it...

http://www.guitartricks.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19810

I don't think going with cheap pedals is the best solution to the problem... trust me. I've looked for the "quick tone fix" before... A lot of times those Danelectro pedals will take a dive not too long after you purchase them... Sure, they're only 20 dollars... but when you have to keep buying htem it adds up... or if you go out and buy one of those rather than just spending the 70-100 bucks on a good quality Boss product... you end up buying the pedal you should have bought in the first place. But it's whatever works for you I suppose.