Webdesign on a shoestring budget

Posted by Rob on 30 Aug 2008 in | Permalink

So you need a website. You have lots of ideas and content for your site but don’t have oodles cash to spend - how is your investment better spent?

1. Be realistic in your expectations

Avoid thinking you can build the next Yahoo! for £500, not surprisingly that will never happen.

2. Prioritise

Make a wishlist of what you want to achieve with your site and prioritise them in order, most important at the top, least important at the bottom. The idea is to be able to forego the least important ones to stay within budget, or to add them at a later date.

3. Get some professional advice

A good web designer is a good person to ask for what solutions can be had for your budget. As a general rule, when I’m preparing quotes for customers who are on a tight budget I’ll provide several options for them to choose from:

Budget option - so the price falls withing their means
Recommended option - so the price comes in at around the budget
Advaned option - “if you spend a bit more you can have all this”

I find this empowers customers to make an informed decision, and makes them more aware of what they will get.

Use a Content Management System

Surprisingly, a fully editable site on a small budget is possible if you do some of the work yourself and have a simple, but usable, design. If you’re prepared to add your own content and this can shave hours off a design project and put more of your resources to building a better site structure.

There are numerous free Open Source CMS’s that could be used but these can require lots of additional development time modifying suit your site. An alternative would be investing some of your budget towards a quality commercial CMS such as Expression Engine which can work out cheaper in the long term.

Concentrate on what’s important

Don’t think about what you’d like, but what you need

Do you really need that guestbook? The chances are you don’t, and dropping those added extras you thought my be nice will cust costs. The savings can then go towards meeting your budget, or investing it somewhere else on the site.

Spread the cost

You might only have the budget for a good basic site right now, but you can expand your site at a later date, as your budget dictated. Over time your small “acorn” site could grow into a big “oak”!