Today, it’s pretty much a given that you need to be on the web. Part of my 6-day email course talks about how insanely cheap it is to host your website and to grab your brand’s domain name. With only a little bit of know how, you can have a great site up and running in just a few hours.
However, sometimes you may want to have a site that is custom tailored to your taste and design expectations. Well, now things are that cheap anymore. Fortunately, there are some things that you can do to significantly decrease the cost of building a unique site.
Re-skin a free or premium theme
Close to 70% of the cost of creating a site is in the layout. If you can find a free or premium theme with the layout style and functionality that you like, all a developer or designer needs to do is change the art. This not only makes things a LOT cheaper, you’ll get a much faster turnaround on your site. However, one thing to keep in mind is that the more functionality that you require, the harder it is to find an adequate theme.
Free themes:
Draw what you want!
The more information that the designer has up front, the less expensive development will be. You need to literally draw out step-by-step of how you expect your users to use the site and where you want your users to go to meet your business needs. For example, if you want to funnel users to your email newsletter, design the flow in which your visitors will get there. Designers are not mind-readers. If you don’t know what you want, nor will they.
Do everything up front!
Changes to Photoshop designs are cheap, but changes to code are not!!!!! The more you change during the coding portion of the project, the more money you are going to spend because developers and designers need to build an original framework in order to effectively produce a site. When you ask to change significant functionalities, database structures need to be changed, entire pages of code need to be altered, and you will have a demotivated designer working for you.
Ryann
September 29, 2010 at 2:15 amI really like this line: "Changes to Photoshop designs are cheap, but changes to code are not.." you're really right about this. In fact, it'd be even better if most of the design changes were done during handdrawn sketches. Of course not many clients like being given hand drawings.
Dean Soto
November 19, 2010 at 2:55 pmOh totally. The hardest thing that you run into with clients though is that they typically don't understand the process and get frustrated. They want a website quickly, and can get fussy when you ask them to approve hand drawn sketches, thinking that you are wasting their time.
Letting them know up front about that can usually neutralize that though. =)