A practical checklist for setting a website budget

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Run through this the next time setting a website budget comes up.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

The checklist

• The cheapest quote usually costs more by the end
• Budget for the year, not just the build
• Content is the line item most often forgotten
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

The reason this keeps coming up

The cheapest quote usually costs more by the end. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What this looks like day to day

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
• Budget for the year, not just the build — 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.