Essential questions before making a new website
Know what you need and how to choose from the various solutions in the market
I run a small development studio, and work with very different businesses. Some of them are the normal companies with a big office and team, other times they are a new startup or even a traditional business looking to keep up with times. Regardless of the diverse background, most of them almost always start with the same phrase: “I want to make a website. How much will it cost?”
I understand that they want a quick way to eliminate their options. However, the answer is unfortunately, never straightforward. There are many factors that contribute to the final quotation, so every project is unique (even with the same client).
Below I will list down some of the common questions we go through with our clients, and try to walk you through the decision making process. I hope that it helps you plan for your upcoming website projects.
1) About you/your business
At the very first stage, you are possibly considering between two main options: a) to use a website builder platform, or b) to engage a developer. To help you decide, we ask questions about you/your business:
i) Is it a New or Established business/entity?
The reason we ask this question is not to charge an established business more. On the contrary, we want to help the new kid on the block save money. Many new businesses make the mistake of spending too much on all the flashy things without a healthy cashflow yet (I’ve seen a small cafe with a 30K website). Also, there are more uncertainties in new businesses — changes in ownership, product/direction etc. — all these translates to changes in the website. It is probably none of our business how one chooses to spend their money, but we usually advise a simple rule-of-thumb:
if one is unsure whether the business will still exist in its current form in the next 2 years, then go basic.
ii) Static or Dynamic?
This means the frequency of the changes on your site, which is directly related to your business activities. Usually this refers to content changes only (i.e. replacing text, images), but it can also include design changes.
Static Sites — generally, if no part of your site is expected to have any changes at all in the next 12 months or more, it is considered a static page. Examples of these are websites for small businesses/non-profit organisations, personal homepages and informational websites.
Dynamic Sites — otherwise, you have a dynamic site. There are much more considerations with a dynamic site:-
i) Does the content change automatically (e.g. product quantity updates, integration with other software) or manually (e.g. new blog post)?
ii) Do you need content updates (text/image) only, or design/structural changes too?
ii) How often will you be making updates?
iii) Do you want to hand off the updates to the developer, or prefer to make the updates on your own/at your own time?
iii) What is a comfortable budget?
I made the mistake of not talking about the money ASAP in my earlier years, because I didn’t want to come across as a money grubber. But
money is the most important motivator/factor in most things — if a client is uncomfortable with whatever he/she is paying, the project can still get abandoned no matter which stage it is in, or how much the implementation is really necessary.
This can turn out to be a lose-lose scenario for all parties so nowadays I bring this discussion upfront:
How much exactly is basic?
Excluding design costs, the very, very rough ballpark for development, in USD:-
0) Free: $0,
i) Basic: $xxx to <$5K,
ii) Normal: >$5K,
iii) Premium studios commonly charge 5-figures and above.
In addition, there is the monthly maintenance/retainer fees, which is optional (for our studio at least). We obviously don’t do the Free tier, but it’s an option if you are able to DIY or find someone who’s willing to do it for you.
Checkpoint
Now that you have a very rough ballpark figure in your mind, you can draw up a preliminary boundary, within which your project scope resides. This helps provide a realistic ground to build your requirements upon.
If you are building a very new business, have lots of other things to pay for and unsure of what you need, you can try a website builder first.
Use plugins, Google Forms, no-code/low-code tools wherever you can if you need a dynamic site. You can even just use a Facebook page. These options let you create a landing page or iterim prototype quickly while you get on with your business operations. Most importantly, it lets you have a realistic feel of what you need, and your pain points.
Remember, if you don’t have a business, you don’t need a website for it. Don’t splurge all your resources when you are still unsure.
But this is only the first step and there is no need to rush into a decision yet. The next few questions will help you understand if you even have a choice, as we now proceed to ask questions about your project.
2) About your Site
Often, it is not just about budget and you may not have the option of going with builders. Below we go through some typical requirements your project might have, that can diminish this possibility for you.
i) What is the Content?
The most critical aspect of the website that affects the quotation, is probably the nature of the content. There are several attributes to consider:-
File Size — What is the average size of your files/assets (e.g. in GB)? Many website builders have about 500MB to 1GB storage for the free tier, and anything above that you’d have to upgrade. Similarly, there will be a cap for the bandwidth as well. What is the amount of traffic that you anticipate?
Architectural Demands — We had a client who required all resources to be on his own machines and local network. We also had another client who demanded support for IE7. For the vast majority of website builders, you’d be uploading your content directly onto their machines, and the website only works well for the major/latest browsers. Do you have specific, special requirements for your project?
Access Control— Is your content sensitive? Do you need to limit access to your content via privileges like membership levels? If you have sensitive files or need to restrict access via some rules, you would likely need to place your files in professional storage solutions like Amazon S3, which allows you to program access rules to a bucket.
Third party integrations —Are you running special programs, APIs etc., or require integrations that are less common(e.g. Linklings, Sharepoint)? Not all third parties have a convenient plugin that can be used on website builders. If you have special integrations, it can be difficult to use such solutions where you might not have permissions to install things or toggle server settings.
ii) Do you require custom Branding and Design?
Are you ok with the layouts/themes available on builders, or are you aiming to take part in a website competition? (We did take part on behalf of our client and won, by the way.) Do you need a custom design or user experience that caters to your specific product/brand?
Also, do you want your own domain?
Builders work well on pre-defined templates and it can be very difficult to achieve the desired look exactly (especially if we consider responsiveness), even for experienced developers on that platform. Not to mention that the site will be heavier than it should be, with customisations on top of the fundamental libraries that these platforms require. If you are looking for more than the standard templates, it may be easier and faster to get a custom build rather than trying to edit on top of a template.
iii) Are you able to DIY some things?
If you have some basic programming knowledge and are willing to do some DIY, you can opt for solutions that are cheaper, or more future-proof. For e.g., you can ask your developer to leave you with access to the server as well as some simple documentation. This might not be the default arrangement though, so please raise it up upfront with your developer if this is something you would require.
iv) Are you a charity/non-profit organisation?
Many platforms and studios (including us) offer discounts or special arrangements if you are a charity or NPO.
A note about headless
Before we go on to talk about choosing which method to adopt, there is a point that I wish to mention about builder platforms: for most of them, your website content will be arranged and defined in accordance to their format and/or hosted in their servers.
As a result, you might not be able to easily:
i) aggregate data from your content, or other data manipulations (e.g. compute min/max),
ii) export or switch from one builder platform to another (e.g. WordPress to Joomla or vice versa),
iii) add custom functions or integrations.
These problems might be resolvable with plugins or extra programming help from an experienced developer in the builder you choose.
A recent development, headless (CMS), can also help to avoid this by separating the frontend and backend as separate modules that you can use and extend upon. It also means that you are not bound to a specific builder or framework. Headless is beyond the scope of this article, but you can read more here.
Some examples include GraphCMS, ButterCMS, Frontastic, Contentful. We are also building our own frontend editor that can work on its own or with a headless CMS at Craft:Scribe (currently in closed beta).
Conclusion
At this point, you should have a more realistic idea of whether your initial budget was sufficient, or was your initial scope too ambitious.
As mentioned in ‘Checkpoint’, if you have a tight budget + on a new experimental project + no special technical requirements + good at DIY, you can consider using one of the web builders. Wix, Weebly, Wordpress are some examples of well-known builders. Many of them have a free tier, which should suffice until you are ready to take your project onto the next level. Basic content updates should be easy with their editor, though you might need a developer to create your own custom templates.
If you are going with a developer, you can also discuss with them on how you can breakdown your project into phases (and develop later phases in future). With the whole roadmap laid out, it is also easier for you to understand the tradeoffs for opting a cheaper “for-now” solution.
More Considerations
i) How do I choose a studio for custom development?
Look through the portfolio. If you prefer a less template/stencil kind of website, make sure you can find examples, and usually such studios don’t offer a standard-priced package. Chat with them — the developer team, if possible — and you should feel comfortable. If you are still uncertain, you should break up your project into smaller milestones and only choose to continue with the same developer if the first one went smoothly. They might try to convince you that it’s cheaper to sign up for the whole thing with them, but it might not be worth the risk (in both money and time).
Engaging a studio is not as scary as it sounds, many will be happy to have a chat with no obligations. (If all else fails, there’s still us.)
ii) Do I need a monthly maintenance/retainer arrangement?
If you anticipate that you are most likely going to have regular/monthly updates, that are not just a swapping of text and images, it can be cheaper to have a monthly retainer arrangement than paying a developer on an ad-hoc basis. This is partly due to the fact that the monthly retainer means that the developer is already familiar with your site and does not need to spend time figuring things out before actually working on the update.
Also, your site is less likely to be a patchwork of fixes/updates if it’s not done by an ad-hoc developer all the time.
In Closing
I hope I have not made any mistakes in this article, but please let me know if there’s any. If you find this article useful in helping to plan for your website, please follow me to be updated on subsequent articles. I will be writing about preparing for development next.
Assumption: The quoted cost for development is assuming normal sites, and not platforms (e.g. a new Facebook, a new AirBnB). Sites that require more backend — database, API integrations, AI, load balancing etc. — will shift these numbers to a much higher scale.
Disclaimer: I cannot represent the whole industry worldwide. I can only state the average amount of what I know from clients/peers.
