Are you considering building a new website? Perhaps your current website is outdated, or it doesn’t look very professional. Perhaps it’s not mobile-friendly or has a very slow loading time. Maybe you’re expanding your brand and need another site. Maybe you don’t even have a website at the moment.
Whatever your reason, it’s likely that you’ll have already started thinking about the budget for building your personal website or a business page. But, of course, depending on what you’re having done, prices will vary.
This can make things confusing.
And that’s where we come in. If you’re not sure where to start with your budget, we’re here to help. Below, we’ve put together a guide for successfully budgeting for your new website build.
1. Determine the purpose of your website
The first step you need to take before you can start budgeting for your website is to establish its purpose. This will help you to determine how important it is for your business and, therefore, how much money you can set aside to making it a reality.
In order to do this, you should ask yourself several questions, these include:
- Does your website need to capture leads?
- Will you be making sales directly through your site?
- Is it just a brochure or portfolio to tell people what you do?
- Are you selling advertising space on your website?
- Does it need to integrate with certain software that you already have?
This way, you can stay focused on your overall business goals and align your website with them.
For example, is the aim of your website to generate sales leads? If so, then this is a very important task, and you need a website that is going to be effective in achieving this. As such, it might be worth it to allocate more resources to it.
2. Decide whether you need a custom or theme-based design
Now it’s time to decide whether you need a custom design or whether you can use a theme-based design instead. At this stage, you should also decide if you’re going to use professional web design services or make your website yourself.
This will have a huge impact on your budgeting, so you need to determine this early on.
It will also impact the features and look of your website, so you need to think about this carefully. You might think that you can build the site yourself and then quickly find that it doesn’t look or work how you want it to.
Similarly, if you can get what you need from a theme-based design, then you’ll be able to save some money. So, think about this carefully before committing resources to a website.
3. Create a list of ‘must haves’
One way to help you determine the type of design you need and how much you’re going to need to budget for your website is to make a list of the ‘must have’ features and those that would be nice but are not necessary.
You might find that, as you move through your list and think about how you want your site to look and function, you’ll add and take things from the list as they become more or less important to the overall structure of your website.
If you need more complex features for your website, again, it might be best to hire a professional designer; and that requires a bigger budget.
4. Do some research into costs and designers
Next, it can be helpful to take inspiration from other people’s websites, and you can also find out how much they paid for theirs and whether they did it themselves or which web development company they hired, or simply check for other companies’ experiences, like Hyperlink InfoSystem reviews and other online sources.
You can also begin shopping around, investigating the different platforms out there that you can build your site on, and looking for professional designers that you can work with. This will help you to get a better feel for average costs, so you can start building your budget.
5. Account for more than just the initial cost
A website project tends to have some upfront costs. For example, you might be paying for:
- Website themes
- A professional designer to build the site for you
- A web hosting platform
- A domain name
But it’s also important to remember that there will be some ongoing costs, either monthly or yearly, depending on how you choose to pay. As such, you need to factor this into your budget.
This might be additional costs such as website maintenance and support fees and hosting for the future. So it’s vital that you take all of this into consideration when budgeting so you don’t get caught out further down the line.
6. Consider the time that will go into building your website
Think about how much involvement you’ll need from you and your team. If you’re planning on designing or building the site yourself, this is going to be quite a lot.
But even if you choose to work with a designer, it’s important to remember that you’ll need time for design approvals and changes, testing and initial design meetings.
This means you need to factor in your time and the time of your employees into the budget as well. You must cost the hours you spend building, reviewing, designing and perfecting your website, as this will take time away from other important tasks.
7. Remember to be a bit flexible with your budget
Finally, it’s important to remember that not everything goes 100% to plan. You might start with an initial figure in your mind, but this could change over time. Either you might find you have to cut back on certain features if funds are tight, or perhaps you’ll end up paying out more to get the site exactly how you want it.
Either way, it’s a good idea to give yourself a margin outside of your budget and to be as flexible as possible – within reason, of course.
You might also find that you dedicate more hours than you had planned to building your website, and you don’t want to become stressed or fall behind as a result.
So like we said, flexibility is going to be the key to budgeting for your website.
