The upfront cost of a website quote can be quite overwhelming for young startups or first-time website owners in general. So, is there any decent way to reduce the initial cost? We have four ways that can help you with the upfront cost of a new website. Let’s dive in.
1. Defining your website content in advance
It’s more common than you might think to have no idea of your website content until the design process begins. At art&tale, we have a list of things we typically figure out during a website strategy session.
It is a great way for us to come up with creative solutions that work within your proposed budget, but if you’re new to web design this can be confusing and lead to miscalculation. To avoid the confusion, you can start with your internal by figuring out these basic points :
- Target Audience
A website’s design depends entirely on who it’s for. - Goals
The success of a website is defined by its goals. Where are we sending users? What’s the call to action? - Sitemap
Plan out your information architecture and content hierarchy - List down essential information
Define what information that wants to be conveyed on the website
Bear in mind that this is not a full website strategy as the strategy variables are numerous and will be further discussed during the website strategy session. However, by defining the basics in advance, it will give us a better starting point about what type of website we will build ahead.
2. Reducing the scope
The easiest way to reduce the initial cost of your new website is by simply reducing the scope by removing sections of content or entire pages. For example, if you want a website with an events page and have no plan on holding less than 5 events per year, then it doesn’t make sense to invest much in that feature.
If you already figured out the sitemap, then reducing the scope is rarely happened or has insignificant change to your prior designed sitemap.
3. Combining low-content pages
One of the bigger cost factors is the number of total unique pages layout. Rather than splitting content into low-quantity pages, we could combine them into a longer form page that optimizes for quality and experience over quantity and takes your audience on a journey through your site, rather than constantly jumping around.
If you have multiple pages that don’t contain high amounts of content, then it’s often a good move to combine them into one. A use case for this is the About page that can be combined with the Careers page. However, the information hierarchy and user journey should be thoroughly planned when combining pages to avoid a bad user experience.
4. Using structured templates
Using the same high-level structure for multiple pages with similar purposes allows launching new pages and scaling easier, as well as much faster development. A good use case for this is a Product or Service page. When you have multiple product pages, they typically construct with a pretty similar pattern so we can immediately cut out a whole slew of unique templates and just focus on what’s different in the middle, which will saves time. Another good example is the terms and conditions page which mainly just static content pages that easily repeatable.
Hence, reducing the upfront cost of a new website through thoughtful planning could frees up a lot more budget to allocate for creative assets later on, which can really help your website’s new design.
