5 Ways to Reduce Your Website Budget

By Rachel Arst McCullough | August 5, 2022

1. Have Fewer Pages in Your Scope of Work
2. Request a Simpler Site
3. Stay on Schedule
4. Keep the Lines of Communication Open
5. Come Prepared for Your Meetings
Elaborate design ideas are rarely worth the cost!

Much of your new website budget is in your hands. Here are five ways to reduce the costs of launching your site while still being satisfied with the end result.

1. Have Fewer Pages in Your Scope of Work

When many of our clients come to us, they say they want to use their old site structure and just refresh the design.

If you’re currently thinking along the same lines, then take the time to run some analytics. Are there pages that nobody goes to? Are you devoting entire pages to services that don’t serve your bottom line? Are there “thin content” pages that could be combined or fleshed out? Are any pages repetitive?

The number of pages matters because each page represents an investment of time: design time, content writing time, time spent shopping for photos, editing photos, or adding them. Content must be entered onto every page. Every page must be edited. Every page must be tested for broken links.

In short, every page counts, and if you have more than you need then you’re spending more than you need to spend.

2. Request a Simpler Site

You may be dreaming of a website full of animations or customized video backgrounds, but do you really need those features?

In most cases, no.

In some cases, those features will be downright detrimental. Depending on your industry, 90% of users could be coming to your pages via mobile phone. You want a fast site, not one that slows down due to having too many bells and whistles.

Is your product or service complicated? If it isn’t, then keep it simple. If it is, then perhaps an explainer video on your home page makes perfect sense, but we’re always asking ourselves how much any given feature will help you.

Another example is the clients who want a full translation of every page of their site into multiple languages. It sounds nice, but does your target market speak the other language? If not, then let Google Translate do its work for the outliers.

3. Stay on Schedule

There are items that we will need from you throughout the process. That could be information about your content, photographs, or content approvals and reviews.

If you’re on schedule with these items, then we are on schedule.

Veering from the schedule costs money. It means we’ve got to spend our time reworking project timelines and rescheduling meetings, reviews, and launches. Time is money, so when we work out a schedule make sure you’ve set aside time to fulfill your end of the process.

4. Keep the Lines of Communication Open

If we request something, send it.

Follow-up time is extra project management time. Extra project management time costs money.

We try not to ask for too much that we haven’t already scheduled with you, but sometimes issues come up. Every email that goes unanswered is costing you money.

5. Come Prepared for Your Meetings

If you do your homework, we can spend our meeting time looking ahead rather than doing things with you that you could have done on your own time. For example, remember all that information we were asking you for earlier? Please send it ahead rather than looking for it on our call. We don’t want to focus our meetings on gathering info. We want to have in-depth discussions about your project and hear from the members of your team about our proposed structures and designs. Let’s make the most of our time together and reduce the number of calls by having all parties prepared.

We are laser-focused on building a website that will increase revenues for your company. We want to focus the discussion on the products, services, and website features that will do just that. Elaborate design ideas may look good, but they may not meet the end goal of turning your website visitors into clients or customers.

Elaborate design ideas are rarely worth the cost!

It’s easy to get caught up in creativity when you’re ordering a new website.

But ultimately, that website has a job to do: it’s meant to help you turn your visitors into clients and customers.

Of course, the site that you end up with will still be well-designed, look good, be modern and fresh, and be on-brand. We never compromise on the quality of your site! We only make suggestions that will help you make the most effective use of your marketing dollar.

If you want to work with a company that will stick to that objective while discouraging you from purchasing features you might not need, reach out to us today.