Budgeting strategies for your web design project can help you stay on budget, no matter how small or large that budget happens to be. Using these strategies is a simple way to ensure that your project turns out great but doesn’t cost a fortune. You may be interested in some of the other articles on web development tools, crm systems and image editing applications.

Budgeting Strategies For Your Web Design Project

Image Credit

Here are seven budgeting tips for your project.

1. Set a budget

The first strategy for staying on budget is to set a budget. You need not just a rough budget, but a specific one. What areas are you going to spend money in? How much do you need to allot to each of those areas? Having a set budget doesn’t mean you never flex a little by moving money from one category to the next, but it does help you see where your spending needs to go. When you set a budget, you can also prioritize, giving higher-priority areas more money and lower-priority areas a bit less.

2. Figure out your deliverables

To really stick to budget, you need to figure out everything that’s going to be involved with making your project work. This means outlining all the deliverables, along with deadlines, if applicable. It’s best to set up deliverables as you’re setting up your budget, as the deliverables and timeline can help you figure out not only what you’re going to spend but also when you’re going to spend it.

3. Leave some wiggle room in the budget

It’s always a good idea to when budgeting for a large web design project – or pretty much anything else in life – to leave some extra room in the budget. This way, if an emergency arises and you need to spend a bit of extra, it’s still coming out of your budget, rather than out of some emergency funds that you may or may not actually have. Try to leave about 5%-10% of your budget as an emergency fund just in case the worst happens.

4. Assign someone to deal with changes

Inevitably, certain things about your project will change as you’re going along, whether that’s the deliverables the client has in mind or the actual cost of certain aspects of the project. Have someone on your design team who can track these changes and figure out how they’re going to affect the overall budget for the project. You may also want to come up with a protocol for knowing when you can dip into that extra emergency funding, so you don’t run to that to solve every minor crisis.

5. Track your budget carefully

The main reason that web design projects and similar projects get off budget is because no one is tracking how the spending is going. Set up a program or a simple spreadsheet so that one of your team members can track all the team’s spending, and then have them track it carefully every time a new expenditure is made. Centralizing the tracking of spending is the best way to make sure you don’t miss anything.

6. Make it cheaper with freelancers

If there are aspects of your web design project that fall outside the scope of the abilities of your team members, consider working with freelancers to fill in the gaps. Many freelancers are great at what they do and have very affordable rates, making it easier to stay on budget with your project.

7. Use a credit card to maximize budgeting throughout the project

One of the main problems with web design and other projects can be cash flow. You need outgoing funds now, but you won’t make money off of the project until it’s finished. If this is a trap you’re finding yourself in, apply for a dedicated business credit card that you can use to get through the project. As long as you can make minimum payments during the duration of the project and pay off the card when the final deliverable is turned in, it can be a great strategy for staying on budget without totally draining a small company’s bank account in the process.

These seven strategies for staying on budget with a web design project can be applied to almost any area of life. Making, tracking, and sticking with a budget isn’t rocket science. It’s just easier if you know what you’re doing ahead of time and if you have different team members to handle pieces of the budget that might be hardest to control!