A short guide to setting a website budget

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Everything we would tell a client about setting a website budget in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What it costs to ignore

The cheapest quote usually costs more by the end. 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.

What good looks like

Budget for the year, not just the build. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

The mistakes we see most

Content is the line item most often forgotten. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

In practice

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
• Content is the line item most often forgotten — 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.