Maximizing Your Project Budget

Over time we've developed methods that allow us to help our clients make informed decisions about how to best spend their limited budgets and get the most bang for their buck.

Be Upfront About Your Budget

Most discussions about web project budgets start with something like, "How much for a website?" The trouble with this question is that is raises the same problems you'd have if you went to a builder and said, "How much for a house?" The answer varies widely.

Even if we consider two different house plans for the same location and floor plan, we can come up with wildly different costs. If I tell my builder, "I want the kitchen to look nice", if they don't know my budget they might assume I want Italian marble countertops. Those will look amazing! But it might blow my budget out of the water when I'd be OK with laminate or polished concrete.

It's similar on the web: consider an events section on your web site. How should it work? It could be a fancy interactive system that automatically pulls events from your internal calendar, handles registrations and notifications, and etc. But if you only have 6 events a year, the cost to do all that is better spent elsewhere, and you can use a simple page of text.

I get it - people don't want to state their budget upfront because they don't want to spend more than they have to, and there's some sense to that. If you come to an agency with a big budget, they can just assume you want lots of Italian marble. But once you've selected a vendor and established some trust, it's helpful to tell them "we have $X to spend and we can't exceed that by a single dollar.", or, "$X is our target and we have some flexibility plus or minus Y percent." These types of discussions will help your project team bring you intelligent suggestions that help you stay within your budget. 

Prioritize What's Most Important

Take some time at the start of a project to consider what areas and features of your website are the most valuable business drivers for your organization. This can help you to focus your team's efforts on the things that are most important.

At Blend, we do this during the discovery phase of a project with a process called Feature Prioritization. As we work with clients to decide what features and components will go in to a web site, we will estimate as we develop plans in order to understand the impact of each piece on the budget. We also ask clients to rate the business value of each feature.

Inevitably, there are always more great ideas for a project than there will be budget and time to implement them all. It's valuable to have more ideas than budget; if we wind up moving more quickly than estimated, we can work more features into the plan, making the most of the budget. Conversely, if things take longer, having an agreed understanding on the "must"s versus the "nice to have"s makes things much simpler. And often, the "nice to have"s become a list of things that can be built as a follow-up to the initial project.

Decide How Much Work Your Team Will Put In

There are a lot of parts of a web project that require a trained developer. But there are also a lot of parts that may be possible for members of your team. You may also have trained developers on your team that could become familiar with the software over the course of the project and take on some of the work.

For instance, if you have a current site, it may take some development effort to migrate your current content to your new website. If your site isn't very big, you might be able to move that content over manually and spend the development budget elsewhere (but if you have thousands of pages, the dev time may be worth it!)

Let's Make the most of It

Maximizing the value of a web development budget requires transparency, strategic planning, and collaboration. By clearly communicating your budget, prioritizing key features, and leveraging your team’s capabilities, you can ensure that your project aligns with your business goals while staying within financial limits. These practices not only help make the most of your resources but also foster a more productive partnership with your development team, setting the foundation for a successful project that delivers long-term value.