how to pay less
A FEW TIPS ON HOW TO MAXIMISE YOUR BUDGET
Designing a website is a service not a product.
Designing a website takes TIME. In many cases it takes a lot of time and quite possibly more than you expect if you haven’t experienced the exercise before. And in this respect it is difficult to reduce charges. After all, you can’t discount time. You can’t turn one hour into 40 minutes.
Of course, you can negotiate the hourly rate and this can be set at the beginning.
But there are plenty of things you can do to reduce overall charges and this depends on the amount of ownership of the project you wish to maintain.
Many clients want the whole brief to be handled by the designers from collaboration, concept and design, copywriting and artwork to the final delivery and beyond.
But the following is a quick guide for you to see where you can cut costs by handling some of the project yourself.
the beginning - the concept
What do we mean by concept? At the beginning of the project we must analyse your business and what you want your website to do. At this stage we will be asking many questions as to what your business does. You will save considerable time if you know exactly what you want. It’s even better if you know how you want to say it and how you want it to appear.content and copywriting
If you have previous copy from an existing site and you are happy with it then it makes great sense to use it again. Copywriting is a significant part of creating a website and if you are confident that you can do it in conjunction with the site concept and the page designs then you should.You know your business better than the designer but he or his team may be able to help you with how you write for your audience. But if you can do this your self you will save a considerable part of your budget.
artwork and graphics
A bespoke website with original artwork will work well for you and stand you apart in your marketplace. However this will be costly. Artwork drawn or created to your specification is a skillful but time consuming process and it isn’t cheap. Your designer should work with you on your expectations and show you what your site could look like if you use stock images. There is a huge reservoir of high quality professionally taken photographs and impressive graphical images and it makes sense to use these if your budget is a concern. However it is always about cost and value. Only you will know how much you need to stand apart from the competition and it sometimes pays to go that extra mile to achieve a more significant return on your investment.
build and development
Building a website from scratch requires computer knowledge and in particular a good grasp of web building software techniques.If you know little about this it will appear daunting to you and is obviously the domain of other more tecchie, geeky, nerdy types with years of experience under their belts. And of course it is time consuming which leads to higher bills.On the other hand you may be able to build your site from a template and there are many available. If you do not deviate from the template and stick rigidly to its format then you can design a site yourself for very little cost. You can bolt on freely available plug-ins and make the site increasingly sophisticated.This is by far the cheapest way of building a web presence and it could look very good. However you must remember that by using a template you have certain design restrictions and you may still have to find someone to help you overcome these.
conclusions
So these are the biggest areas in which we have shown you how to save money on your website project. If you design, write, create the artwork yourself and build from a template you will save nearly everything that your web designer has just quoted you. In fact you will be designing the site and building it yourself which is an immensely challenging and ultimately rewarding experience. But I pretty much guarantee you won’t be doing it in the time that an experienced design team can do it in.If you can tear yourself away from the business that makes you money to do the site then go for it. Remember though how much lost revenue you will have to endure for the duration! In short, we will always help you to save money wherever possible. We understand that budgets have to be met and that there is no bottomless pit.We will work with you to ensure that your project is a success and that we have another site in our portfolio that we can show off to new clients. We are in it together!
