When setting a website budget is worth the effort

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Setting a website budget is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

When it is worth it

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.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

How to decide

Content is the line item most often forgotten. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What this looks like day to day

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 any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.