The Adido Digital Blog

Often clients will compromise on design or development due to budget restraints. While this is reasonable (none of us have bottomless wallets), it can often lead to long term costs that will have client and developer alike banging their heads in frustration.

Early on, the cost of creating a website can seem intimidating. You take a look at your budget and decide to compromise on quality in the short term. You can always fix it later, right? Wrong. You should always strive for the website you want rather than the website you can afford.

Ok so you can’t just make money appear out of thin air. Sometimes your budget is stubborn – you just can’t budge it. But if you can, you should seriously consider it. Don’t design twice when you can get it right the first time. Aside from the cost of having a site redesigned, you have the change of corporate image to consider. Your corporate image is an ever evolving beast, and is determined by, among many other things, the look and feel of your website. You don’t control your image directly – it is the sum of your marketing efforts.

So if you change that website, it will change how people perceive your business. And that should always be the primary motivation for redesigning your piece of the internet – change because you want to, not because you can afford to. And if you want to, why settle for less the first time round?

Of course, it’s all well and good to say “don’t compromise on quality”, but what does that actually mean? Well there are several ways this can happen, from accepting the first design given to you (even if it isn’t really right for you) to designing the site yourself. The latter may seem like a great way to cut costs. After all, who knows what you want better than you?

But if web design was that easy, then we wouldn’t have web designers, just web developers. Often when a client does all of their own design work, one of two extremes occurs: either the site looks bland and uninteresting, or it looks overcrowded and complex. And often the pitfalls of designing your own work have nothing to do with ability or lack thereof. It often comes down to objectivity. Something which a third party has, but you don’t. A full time web designer is used to designing quickly and not attaching too much sentiment to their work. They spend their career observing the strengths and weaknesses of every website they see, and you’d be a fool not to take advantage of that depth of knowledge.

Just remember that while it may seem like a short step to improve on your website later, that short step can quickly become a gaping hole that will swallow up your budget. Better to plug the gap early on and avoid long term costs.