6 Practices to Reduce The Website Development Cost

Having a professional website is a must for any business these days. It is the first and foremost criterion to stay competitive and visible in the market. A business that wants to reach out to its target audience far and wide and continuously grow with user interactions and business conversion must have a professionally developed website with content and features that address the needs of their target audience. Otherwise there are chances for programming mistakes that cost a lot.

But building a professional website is not also an easy job if you want to shape it as a business channel just like your storefront or business office. If you are a startup, you are likely to be already bogged down by the cost concerns and many other development challenges.

If keeping the cost of development low while maintaining optimum quality is your focus, here we are going to explain the most important and time-tested practices for professional website development at a lesser cost and with basic programming principles that you should programmers follow to become good programmers.

Here are the 6 Practices to Reduce The Website Development Cost

1. Start with a Meticulous Planning

The first thing that should come first, and so you should begin with detailed and meticulous planning for your new website project. Proper and well-thought-out planning will give you relief from revision and repair work in the future and hence can be hugely advantageous both in terms of reducing cost and delivering consistent user experience. Proper planning should begin by establishing the key objective of your website. Here are some questions to answer to identify your website goals.

• Who is the target audience of your website?
• What purpose your website is going to serve your audience?
• What are the key features and functions of your website that are going to help you in fulfilling these objectives?
• What kind of website content should your website have for your audience?
• What are the key competitor websites and how they did in all the above-mentioned areas?  

Only when you have a detailed answer to all these questions, you can get a clear picture of the cost components, and based on them, you can figure out the total cost of development.

2. Giving priority to Simplicity 

Let’s not beat around the bush and tell straight in your face that a complex website with too many design layers and loads of rich media content involves a lot of costs. So, in case you are going to build a very complex and multi-layered website, make your cost expectation accordingly.

On the other hand, if you want to build a simple website with a flat design, the initial development cost will be favorably lower than the average. Moreover, if you want to populate your website pages with too many rich contents and unique media files, the cost of content will be added to your total cost. This is why to keep the development cost lower and within your expectation, have a simple design and use mostly text and images as your primary content.

3. Use a CMS with Most things Pre-Built 

For building a website in minutes time with all the required features, there is no better way than to use a Content Management System (CMS). There are several high-quality CMS systems in the market that come with almost all the key features and layout options for building a website.

You can choose a CMS solution and select themes from their theme repository based on your preferred design layout and the features. Moreover, many of these CMS solutions come packed with hundreds of useful themes and plugins that are required by various niche websites. Instead of coding a website from scratch, building it with a CMS solution like WordPress, Magento, Drupal is others will save your cost if development.

4. Embrace an MVP Approach of Development 

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a widely popular development approach that focuses on building a website or app with a stripped-off user experience. The idea is to deliver the quintessential value instead of getting diverted with too many features and design elements.

By focusing on the basic and elementary website experience and by reducing the number of features at the initial stage, you can reduce the development cost to a great extent. As your business grows and as the traffic flow increases over time, on the basis of user feedback, you can always incorporate new features and design changes.

5. Keep the Number of Website Pages at a Minimum 

When you hire developers for your new website project, they are likely to charge on an hourly basis, or they can quote a development cost based on the number of pages. So, either way, the number of pages will definitely take a toll on your cost of development. This is why it is always advisable to keep the number of pages at a minimum to reduce the total cost of development.

In the initial stage, only create pages that are absolutely necessary and stay away from creating all the pages at one go. You can always add new pages as your traffic volume grows.

6. Always Use Free Images 

When you use original and unique images for your website and source them from professionals, they add up to the development cost. Even if you shoot those images with a professional photographer and hired models, it involves considerable cost. In contrast, using free or stock images are always beneficial in terms of cost-saving.

There are plenty of free or stock image websites with a vast repository of images representing almost every niche or category. You can always use these sources for the cost advantage.

Conclusion

Finally, low-cost website development is no longer an option for small businesses and startups. Even big enterprises want to grab the cost advantage at the initial stage. The above-mentioned measures and ways can help as a website to reduce the development cost while not compromising with the quality.

We hope the information in this article will help you. Stay tuned to our Programming section to get regular updates.

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