Does your website budget need to go on a diet?

April 28, 2011 | by Jill Kurtz | Posted in Web Development, Web Strategy

The other day I was watching Top Chef Masters on Bravo TV. The cooking challenge posed to some of the country’s top chefs was to create a 1,500 calorie meal. I thought easy – I budget calories with every meal I prepare.

Well, not so much for the top chefs. None of the chefs had ever counted calories before! All were challenged because none of their high-calorie tricks to make food taste great could be used. They had no idea to create excellent food with fewer calories.

Does your website suffer the same challenge? With the current economy, can you still afford the high-calorie website budget you established years ago? Or, do you need to develop a plan that uses less calories, er dollars.

I think that putting your website budget on a diet may be a good move for you – and your website. You may just find out that you can accomplish a lot with less.

First, let’s hope you have invested in a content management system. Any CMS puts you in a great place to add lots of functionality to your site without a lot of additional development. Just about every CMS has modules or plug ins that can be added to what you have. Depending on your platform, these may be low cost or free.

The lesson here is move away from thinking “redesign” and think more about “adding on.” If you aren’t already, you should regularly monitor the development website for your CMS. There you will see what the latest add-ons are and get some great ideas about how to enhance your site.

• WordPress
• Drupal
• Joomla
• DotNetNuke

Second, take a good look at your customer-serving processes that happen online and offline now. Can any be streamlined by using the web? Your customers are likely more web savvy now than when you launched your website. And, there are many successful practices out there to model. You can find several of them among the case studies of Balance client work.

Since you don’t have to re-invent the wheel or spend a lot of time educating your customers, bringing services and interactions online is more viable and cost-effective than ever.

Third, remember that your web presence is never done. By keeping this in mind, you realize that you don’t have to do “everything” now. Your website will be just as well served by incremental improvements over time. Take that list of great ideas and budget them out over time. Not only does this help you budget, it gives visitors a reason to keep coming back to see new developments.

Please share your ideas on how to sustain an engaging website with shrinking budgets.