There are many factors that you should think about when preparing to make your website design affordable. Making affordable website designs is something that every website designer strives toward if they wish to keep their clients happy. In this article we are going to discuss how both you as a customer and your website designer can work together to make your affordable website design.

1. Let your website designer know what your specified budget is.This is rule number 1 for a reason! Affordability is different for each business. For example, I was talking to one of my acquaintances about boats while we were going for a boat ride on his new yacht. He said that the boat was “affordable” so he bought it and he loves it. Another acquaintance told me he was looking for a boat. “Affordable” to him was a price around $1200. Affordability is the amount of a resource (money, time, etc) to spend on something and it is not the same for any two people. It is important to let your web designer know what “affordability” means to you as a customer.



2. Know what you can live without!
   Let’s face it, everyone wants their website to have ecommerce, interactive features, rank high in the search engines, get unlimited updates and make them financially independent. I’ll let you in on a little secret…you won’t get any of those with a $10/month website. Having a website that does all of those things is possible. They have been done before, but affordability was never mentioned while they were working on the project. So maybe having a presence online where your customers can reach you via email and find out more about your company and your store hours is what you really need. More likely than not, your website designer can do all of the things mentioned above, but you can help make your affordable web design easier on yourself, your wallet and your designer.



3. Have all materials ready for your website designer.
   This help is extremely appreciated by all web designers that are on a project budget. A list of some of the things that you can have ready is as follows:
   
   
   • Text for the web pages that you would like
   • The pictures/images you would like on each page
   • The location of the pictures/images (either on the web, on your computer or in your house)
   • A company brochure
   • A thought about what you would like the design of your website to look like
   • Links to other websites you would like to have on your website
   
   This can be a tremendous help for making affordable website design. All of these items mentioned save your website designer time and makes things more efficient. Do them and it will lower the cost of your business website design project.



4. If you think of any changes you’d like or features you’d like to add, bring them up and talk to your designer about them.
   They might have an effect on the affordability or have some other extra steps that you don’t see that would need to be set up in order to have the new feature. Keep the lines of communication open! Having an affordable website design takes effort from both parties.

In conclusion, making an affordable website design is realistic and can be done. Having an affordable website design is done all the time, but it needs help from both the client and the website designer to make sure it is done properly. Help the web designer by gathering around items that are needed in the project. Also, it’s always a good idea to keep the lines of communication open, and affordable web design is no exception. Keep these ideas in mind when you are involved in a website project and you will have no problem keeping your goal of having an affordable website design.