Keeping Website / Blog Costs Down

Tips to Keep Costs in Check

1. Start thinking carefully about your message, goals, and business direction as soon as you get your strategy and preliminary site structure. Be prepared to discuss any changes in direction at our follow-up meeting or as soon as you understand what needs to change. (Don’t worry, we know that change happens—but we also want to avoid do-overs whenever possible to keep your cost down).

2. When you’re working on your website budget, keep in mind that strategy, content, and maintenance costs are billed separately.

money target3. Be aware that when you ask us to take stop-gap measures on an existing site or need help with your technology, we are here for you; but this type of work is separate from our considerations about your web budget. You will be billed for additional consultations and work every 2 weeks at $125/hr for education, content, and strategy work, and $75/hr for web work.

4. If you are comparison shopping for web services, ask specific questions about strategy, content, and SEO—if another company doesn’t provide those services our prices won’t be comparable.

5. Strategy and content costs are less flexible if you want a quality product. There are different options available when it comes to design, development, and maintenance, so if you need to reduce your cost, look to a template design solution and it will save on both design and development.

6. Expect to have maintenance on your site, it will be necessary and unless you have excellent web skills you should budget accordingly.

7. If you want to have ongoing support with business tasks (putting out a newsletter, blogging, or leveraging social media, for example) then you need to factor those costs in separately as well.

Tips to Keep your Content-related Costs Down

If you want Chaos To Clarity to create your content and keep your costs down, you will have to be diligent about contributing basic information to the project so that we have the best possible foundation to inform your brand story and write your text.

  • Provide any requested information quickly so that we don’t have to keep asking for it.
  • Read emails and documents carefully and offer thorough responses when asked.
  • Send bullet point lists with relevant site information and key phrases for branding if we are writing your content.

Be very clear about your own level of involvement when it comes to creating your site content. (For example, if you plan to create your own content, then you must be able to do so in a timely fashion or it will bring the project to a screeching halt.)

  • Do you plan to provide only raw information for your site in bullet point lists and have us do all the writing? If so, be sure to include links to outside businesses, products, and localities in any text you provide (otherwise we have to look them up and it will add to your cost).
  • Do you want to create any or all of the content yourself? Be very specific about what you want to do and your time-line for doing it—remember that your project is one of many in our work-flow and planning ahead lets us function more efficiently.
  • Do you want message approval? Let us know so that we can streamline communications about it. (We hope that you do want to be involved, since it’s important to tell your story in a way that suits you.)

Think ahead—let us know which parts of your website you’ll need to change regularly so that we can meet your needs with the best possible solution.

Remember that you have to monitor your budget too, and that means considering requests for online meetings, phone meetings, and email responses carefully because we will bill for our time.

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