Before you invest in setting a website budget

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Before you spend anything on setting a website budget, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• The cheapest quote usually costs more by the end
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

What to watch for

Budget for the year, not just the build. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Content is the line item most often forgotten. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

In practice

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Three things worth confirming about setting a website budget before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• The cheapest quote usually costs more by the end — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.