low budget website?

small businesses often can't afford the higher budgets of established competitors. What should you do?

We're often asked this question and the answer to it is nearly but not always the same. I've written this page to help with the particular requirements of the low-budget buyer.

what do we mean by low budget?
A good (i.e. professional, experienced, qualified and talented) web designer will typically charge between £40-£60 per hour (or around £300-£500) a day freelance. His employed counterpart in a modest-sized, successful web development agency will likely be charged out at £50 to £75 an hour (or more for a national-level studio). As it's highly unlikely that a designer (freelance or employed) will be able to do much for you without meeting first, talking through your business concept and making a proposal - before even starting work on any concepts, flat visuals or interactive mock-ups for you - then any budget less than £2,000 would be considered a small budget.

If that's you then here's what I recommend:

1. Revisit your business plan
Do you really need a new website? Why? What does it need to achieve for you? How much business could or should it generate? How much maintenance time will be required in keeping the site up to date? What skills will you need to update the site? How will anyone find the site? How do you place a value on any leads generated for you by the site? Are there any other time or money-saving advantages that can be built into the site for you (like online order taking, tracking or self-administration)?

Example. Let's say that you are a dentist. And let's say that every new client is worth £200 a year to you? Or £400 a year? Over the lifetime of that client the lifetime value (LTV) of each new client could be upwards of £2,000 to £4,000 each. If any new website you had designed for you helped bring in just 10 extra new clients a year you could be adding £20,000 to £40,000 of extra lifetime value to your business per annum!

So do your sums. Make sure you're starting your business with enough capital to bring the clients in. It could be that with the right balance of design, marketing, promotion and PR that your website and business needs, you could find yourself with hundreds of extra new clients a year and hundreds and thousands of extra LTV value for you.

I can't believe how many clients I see either under-designing their sites (and getting no responses), under-marketing their sites (and getting no visitors) or under-managing their sites (losing customers and market share over time). So do your sums. Allow a good budget for design, development and marketing. We can help with all these considerations as well as being expert-level website designers and developers.

If you're still committed to your business but still have less than £2,000 to spend then jump ahead to the alternatives. Go >>

2. Consider how your customers find the new site
OK you have a great new site. Or worse it's just average. Even worse still: it's a stinker! But you still need to get new visitors onto it. Do you expect the site to perform well on Google (or any other search engine)? Have you considered online advertising? Have you structured and written the content to perform well on UK search engines? What keyphrases would work best for you? Have you looked into cost-per-click (CPC) advertising? Local search results? E.G. "dentist in Croydon"? How much is each new lead worth to you anyway?

Measuring and managing website performance is one of the key ongoing services we provide for our clients. We excel at it. How well will your website perform compared to your competitors?

3. Consider the upkeep time
Some of our largest clients spend hundreds of thousands of pounds developing new websites. And sometimes that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's not unusual for a large site to need several full time staff administering parts of the site, writing and updating content, dealing with enquiries and managing performance issues.

A small site is no different. It's just smaller.

How will you keep the site fresh and interesting? Or just up to date? Do you want to update the site yourselves? What skills and experience do you need? If you wanted an exciting, high-impact, new site using sound, animation and advanced interactive features can you still update the content yourself?

It is this combination of performance management, upkeep cost and ongoing development that we consider most closely in designing a new site for our clients. Sometimes the best solution is a combination of bespoke site design and content management. At other times we will recommend a new content management system (CMS) or we'll be designing a new site to run on an existing CMS. We have also designed and built custom CMS systems for our clients. It doesn't matter to us which scenario we recommend but it will do to you. But considering how much ongoing management is required and who will be doing it is a pre-cursor to designing and recommending an overall approach for you.

Finally, we can help with and often manage all these issues for our clients - saving you the time, trouble and cost of trying to do it yourselves. With ongoing changes occurring to the internet (and related technologies) on a seemingly daily basis, it is increasingly a better option to outsource all the work to specialists such as The Quantos Consultancy.

philosophy, methodology, approach and solutions
To understand more about our approach and methodologies and to see casestudies please use any of the following links:

philosophy		solutions
methodology		case studies

If after all of that you still think you have less than £2,000 to spend then here are the alternatives:

the alternatives
Use an existing, pre-designed, professional website template! After all, did you buy your last suit from a tailor or from Next? Using a professionaly designed template will be highly preferable to attempting to do this on the cheap with 'someone your auntie knows'. If you have followed the above tips and have looked carefully enough at your business plan then you will already know the value of getting your website right and seeing new business role in on the back of it.

Here are some sample pre-designed templates available from our affiliate www.designgalaxy.net. Click through to see all the samples - all of which can be ordered and downloaded directly from our affiliate site:

With these pre-designed template available from as little as $49 online you can hit the ground running and spend any budget you do have on customising the content and making sure the new site performs well in your local marketplace. It's a safe option and you can still top-and-tail these sites with your new logo, colours and typographic scheme - depending of which template you choose.

Warning: All these sites are excellently designed and all ready-to-develop rather than ready-to-use. You will still need to employ a professional-level developer (i.e. us) to re-populate the content, develop the graphics and links to suit your exact needs. And you always need to consider the site structure and content carefully if you will need your site to perform well on search-engines.

the next step
I really hope that helps with your decision making. You can always call me direct for a quick, confidential chat about your requirements. We'll be pleased to point you in the right direction or welcome you as an exciting new client.