What to ask your agency about setting a website budget

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on setting a website budget, these questions are worth asking early.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

The cheapest quote usually costs more by the end. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Content is the line item most often forgotten. 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.

The short version

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. 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

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.