How to Budget for a New Website
If you’re a local business and you’re trying to figure out how to budget for your website, this is for you.
In this article, I’m going to walk through some practical steps on how to do budgeting for your website correctly, so you can set your business up for success, know what to expect upfront and not get overcharged for things you might not need.
Define the Purpose
When budgeting for a website, it’s best to start with the end in mind.
What is the ultimate goal of your new website?
For most local businesses it ends up being either:
- Getting leads (lead generation)
- Selling something on the site (e-commerce)
- Or a combination of both.
For Lead Generation (services)
If you sell a service that you deliver in your area or your customers come to your location, then the main goal of your site would be to get leads from the internet that you can sell your services to.
That’s what we call a lead generation website.
The vast majority of local service businesses fall into this category.
For eCommerce (products)
If you sell a product online, then typically e-Commerce would make sense.
Depending on your industry, you could also sell your services on your site allowing your customers to purchase and schedule an appointment for example.
Or you could sell products from your local store for delivery around your city, state or the entire country.
Either way, this is what we call an eCommerce website.
Both
In some cases, your business may need a website that is a combination of both.
Lead generation for services and e-Commerce for services and/or products.
Action Item:
Decide which one of the three categories your website falls into.
Budgeting Website Costs
If Your Business Sells Services
The best starting point to get local leads for services is to create a website page dedicated to each service.
Each page should talk all about the benefits, functions and features of that one specific service.
You might be asking, why not just put all services on one page to save money?
Yes, you could put all services on one page to save on your website budget, but:
- It decreases the percentage of visitors that will turn into leads (aka conversion rate) which hurts sales.
- It decrease the number of visitors you’ll get when people are looking for a service you sell.
A dedicated page for each service, gets more website visitors and leads from those visitors.
Action Item:
Make a list of the main services that you want to sell on your website. Each one should get its own dedicated page.
If You’re Selling Products (eCommerce)
How many products or services do you want to sell on your website?
Each products needs a dedicated page that talk all about the benefits, functions and features of that one specific product including a option to purchase online.
Action Item:
Make a list of the services and/or products that you want to sell now. Each one gets it’s own product page.
Logo Design
Do you have a logo and brand style guide?
From my experience, most businesses come up with following before looking at a budget for their website:
- The business idea
- The business name
- Then the logo
By the time a business contacts a website agency to start their website project, they usually already have a logo completed.
There are lots of ways and places to get a logo and style guide.
If you don’t have one at this point, you’ll want to set some budget aside for that.
Action Item:
Decide if you want a custom logo and brand style guide for your website or something more template-based as this will affect the budget.
Website Costs for Design and Dev
Two Ways to Budget for Design
There are two approaches to budgeting your design and website development cost:
- Using Templates
- Custom Design
Using Templates
Website templates are existing, fill-in-the-blank, designed layouts for your site and pages.
Using a template allows you to paste in the images, videos and wordings to save on website costs.
This can work if you’re trying to get your website launched on a very limited budget, but you run the risk of not looking unique which can decrease the percentage of visitors that turn into customers.
Going Custom
A custom website allows for complete freedom in how your website and each page are designed.
There are practically no limits to your options and you should end up with a professional and unique website.
This option generally results in a higher percentage of visitors becoming leads, but it requires a higher budget.
Build
There are two approaches to the development of a website:
- Custom coding
- Website platforms and frameworks
- A combination
Custom Coding
Custom website design coding means that a developer will write the code that builds your website and this will substantially increase your budget.
This is most often required if you are inventing a new way of doing something or very few existing businesses are doing something that you want to do.
For example, if you wanted to do a business that was kind of like Uber, but different in some way, it will require custom coding.
Or let’s say you wanted to come up with a social media platform, like Facebook, but different, it will require custom coding.
Or you want to do something no one else has even remotely done, it will require custom coding.
By the way, if your website needs custom coding it will need custom website design as well.
Platforms and Frameworks
Doing something new is so rare, that in almost all cases local businesses do not need custom coding for their website which will save thousands on the budget.
Since most local businesses are not re-inventing the wheel, it usually means that using a website platform or framework makes the most sense.
Websites fall into two categories:
- DIY website developement platforms
- Frameworks
DIY Platforms
DIY website builder platforms are complete systems that have tons of existing templates and drag and drop functions. This may be the right fit for your business instead of hiring a web designer.
Some examples are WIX, Squarespace and Shopify.
WIX and Squarespace are a better fit for a lead generation site and Shopify is better for an eCommerce site.
This could be a good option if:
- Your budget is extremely limited and you’re willing to build the website your self.
- You want to test out a new idea before investing in a website.
These platforms are getting better and better every year, the downside, is that you do not own the website and website design.
While you own all the content, if you decide to move to a different platform or framework, you will need to re-design and re-build the website. In addition, if you’ve built up local SEO traffic, that will be lost.
Action Item:
Decide on the kind of design and build your website needs.
Domain Name
The domain name is the website name.
For example, Google is the business, google.com is the domain name.
Depending on where you will design and build your website, the purchase and hosting of the domain name may be a part of that service or it may be separate.
Hosting
Website hosting is the service that puts your website out on the internet for anyone to find,
Depending on where you will design and build your website, the purchase of web hosting may be a part of that service or it may be separate.
Action Item:
Determine if the domain and web hosting will be part of a service or purchased separately.
The Content
Content is king. While the design and logo are important, is the content that gets traffic, leads and sales.
There are three kinds of content you’ll want to factor in:
- Wording
- Images
- Video
Wording
If we have to pick one kind of content over another, it has to be the wording. While the images and video support, it’s the wording that ranks a page on search engines, gets people to click on ads and turns visitors into leads.
There are three ways to get the wording:
- Write it yourself
- Hire a writer
- Hire a website design agency that has a writer.
Unless you’re an experienced website copywriter, I’d suggest going with option 2 or 3. While you could DIY a website build on a platform and do well, if you DIY the wording, you will lose sales.
There’s an art and science to writing content that both ranks on search engines and turns visitors into leads. Doing it wrong could cost you hundreds of thousand in sales revenue for your business.
Images
Images are key pieces of content that should support the wording.
There are three ways to do this:
- Hire a photographer
- Use free-to-use images from the internet
- A combination of both
Hire a photographer
If you really want to be unique, than hiring a photographer may be the way to go.
This can be influenced by your industry, your favorite customers, your sales points and profit margins.
If you’re in an industry where none of your competitors hire a photographer, than you may not need one.
If you’re in an industry where you think custom photos will be important to persuading your prospective customers to turn into leads, than you probably need a photographer.
Great photos can increase the number of leads you get from your website traffic, but the budget for a photographer could equal or exceed all other costs for the website, so this is an important decision that needs to be balanced out with the factors above and your budget.
Use Free-to-Use Images
If hiring a photographer is not an option or needed, than free-to-use images, could be the way to go.
While you could purchase some stock photos, in most cases there are typically sufficient free images available at sites like Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay.
The downside is using images that are clearly stock images that your customers have seen on other websites or just look staged.
A Combination of Both
The third option is a combination.
What we often up with is hiring a photographer to take staff photos and sometimes some interior photos of the business. Then supplement the site with stock images that complement the style and subject matter.
This is where most businesses end up as it’s typically the best fit.
Action Item:
Decide which one of the three categories your site falls into.
Video
Video is different from images. While you could use some short stock videos for certain parts of your site, creating your own videos is best.
Video needs to be authentic as people are used to seeing real people and real situations on social media and Youtube.
There are three ways:
- Hire a videographer
- DIY the video
- Don’t do any video right now
Hire a Videographer
This is similar to hiring a photographer.
It helps to answer these questions:
- What is your competition doing or not doing?
- What is the purpose of each piece of video content?
- Will hiring a professional increase leads and sales over DIY?
- Do I have the budget right now?
Answering those questions will help determine how to proceed.
DIY the Video
Video is the opposite of photos, DIY may be better and get more leads then hiring a videographer.
If you and your team are willing to be on camera, DIY may be the way to go.
Turning on the camera is the easy part. The hard part is understanding what your audience wants to see and working out a content strategy.
Don’t do any Video
If there’s no way that video can be done at this time, then it’s not absolutely required.
Getting Visitors to Your Site
Budgeting for Marketing
Getting visitors to your site is as important as the website itself.
There are three ways to do digital marketing:
- Organic
- Search Engines
- Advertise
Organic
Organic traffic is mainly posting on social media multiple times every day. While this is free in the sense that you can do it yourself, it is time consuming and can take the longest of the three ways to get customers.
The success rates with organic posts are heavily affected by the content, industry and consistency.
While organic posting is not the ideal way to get customers today, it is important to building your brand name and awareness.
Search Engines
Search engine optimization (SEO) is fundamental to getting customers.
If you’re customers are local, then they are most likely on search engines looking for your services and doing research before they contact you.
While getting customers from Search has the highest return on investment of the three options and is faster then organic posts, it is slower than advertising.
Advertise
There are several different ways to advertise:
- Search engine ads
- Social media ads
- TV commercials
- Radio commercials
- Direct Mail
- Billboards
How or if you choose to advertise will depend on where your favorite customers are hanging out.
Advertising gets a higher return on investment then organic posting, but not as high as search engine optimization.
It is faster than organic posting and search engine optimization, but can require a higher budget to turn a profit.
Action Item:
Decide if you will do one, two or all three traffic generation approaches.
If search engine optimization is chosen, make room in the website design scope and budget.
Final Tips to Budgeting
By going through steps above, you’ve just created a basic scope of work outline for your project.
The next step is to check out How Much Does a Website Cost and start putting some numbers to it.
As you go through that process, you’ll find that you:
- May have the budget for everything in your scope of work.
- May need to increase your budget.
- May need to modify the scope of work to fit into your budget.
However you decide to move forward, making sure that your scope of work helps you achieve your website’s main purpose is the most important thing.
- Getting leads
- Selling something on the site
- Or a combination of both.