Planning A Website To Cut Development Costs

Planning a website before it is created is a critical part of website development. When clear instructions are given to the website designer, the job takes a shorter period of time to finish, will have fewer revisions, and will be closer to what you want. There are a number of important technical and design aspects that have to be addressed before website creation should begin, and a plan that accounts for all of these aspects will save you time, money, and effort. Here we're going to take a look at what all you should take into account when planning a website, and what information you should be giving a website designer when it's time for production.

The first part of planning is to consider who your target audience is and what the purpose of the website will be. This information will guide the website designer's decision-making process. From there, you'll need to choose a domain name which will suit this purpose, and a type of web hosting that best fits your needs. While your website designer can generally do these things for you, they need to know the purpose of the website to be able to do it well. Otherwise you could end up with a domain that doesn't make sense for the purpose of your website and a hosting package that costs much more than what you need.

The best way to get across your plan for the website is to draw a rough flowchart which explains the pages that will be included. Just the main pages along with any sub pages will do, this gives the designer a good idea of the amount of work involved. Often the price will be influenced by the number of pages on your site.

Other than the domain name and hosting fees, the only other actual cost involved is the amount paid to the website designer. If you have a sort of design in mind, or have seen a website design that you like, you can show these to your website designer, and that will help give them a vision for what the final product should look like. This will speed up the website development process, and if your designer is working for an hourly wage, this means that it will cost less to have your website produced. Even if your designer is working for a flat fee, they may charge extra for various revisions and changes, so it's best if you let them know what type of design you're expecting up front. This way their final product will look much closer to what you're wanting and you'll have to deal with fewer revisions, which means lower costs.

Besides knowing your audience, the purpose of the website, and the general layout of where things should be on the website, you'll also need to provide information about what content you want on the actual website. These are clear instructions that a website designer can follow when setting up the different sections of the website. With the ideal content in mind, a designer can work effectively and efficiently when building your website.

This article was written by Lee Samson who runs Samson Web Design, a website development company and search engine optimisation company based in Sussex, UK. If you are looking for web design or SEO advice or a quotation for any web based project get in touch using the link above.
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