Setting a website budget: what to get right first

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you only fix one thing about setting a website budget this quarter, make it the first item below.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Start here

The cheapest quote usually costs more by the end. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Then this

Budget for the year, not just the build. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Eventually

Content is the line item most often forgotten. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

How to tell if yours is fine

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. 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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.