Estimating the right budget for website designing is extremely important to deliver the website on time and avoid any customer disappointments that might occur due to wrong budget estimations. In fact, once you give an estimate to your client, it can be very difficult to go back on it. Of course, there is a small margin of error but it should only be a margin and shouldn’t increase more than that.
Whether you charge your clients per hour or on flat rates, it is crucial to give them an estimate before moving on with the projects. For most clients, pricing is a deciding factor and you need to respect that.
To help you with the estimation and gain more clients, the team behind Frugaa has done a detailed research and we hope we can help you out with all your future web designing projects.
Points to consider while estimating budget for website designing
1. Understand the client requirement and expectations
The first thing to do is to understand client requirements and their expectations from the project to make sure both sides are on the same page. Meet the client face to face understand what exactly they are looking for and make sure you have got all the requirements finalized on paper. This needs to be done so that even if the client adds a few more requirements later, you can ask for an increase in the budget and time.
And that brings us to the most important point that needs to be discussed with a prospective client – the budget. Some clients have unreal expectations with way too low budgets. It is important to filter that right away and let them know the kind of budgets you usually work with.
2. Select the features
Depending upon the requirements that the client might need in their website, select the technologies that need to worked with. The first and the main cost includes buying a website domain. If your client doesn’t already have one, he will ask you to buy it for him. You can get great deals on domains like GoDaddy, HostGator and Domain.com. As you might already know, there is a lot that goes behind a website, including-
- Design costs
- Graphics and Images
- Content Management System
- Training and Documentation
- Blog
- Email marketing Campaigns
- Newsletters
- News Feed, contact forms
- Search Engine Optimization
- Social Media Optimization
- Advertising Integration
With every feature that is added to the website, the price obviously goes up. So it’s always better to consult with your clients at this stage to find out how many features they actually want you to install. It’s also better to always have a fixed price for each of these features so that it’s easy for you to calculate the total budget.
3. Break down the requirements
Once you have got all the requirements and features list from the client, it is time to break it down into different phases. Breaking down the requirements helps you in a lot of ways. First of all, it helps you understand the exact work that needs to be done and it helps you organize it in the right way.
If you have a team of people who work along with you, then by dividing the requirements into smaller components you can easily allocate the work among other team members to ensure that the work will be done on time.
4. Set a timeline
By taking the project to a granular level, it becomes easy to estimate how many hours it would take for each phase. Now, start setting a deadline for each phase, make sure you are adding a few extra days, just to be on the safe side. Add all these timelines to get the final duration. Again, add 10% to the total time just to have some extra time on your hands.
5. Add margin of error
This point wouldn’t exist in an ideal world but it’s not one, and that is why, you need to add a margin of error before moving forward. Sometimes the estimated amount proves to be under budget while sometimes things go over the estimation rate, margin of error gives you some room to change things. But more than that, it gives the client a realistic range for the entire project. This in turn helps you retain the trust of your client too.
The margin of error should be somewhere around 15-20%.
After you are done estimating the budget at your end, it’s time to discuss the budget with the client. If it’s a little over client’s expectations, he might want to negotiate or remove a few features to make the budget more affordable. If you have followed all the steps that we mentioned, then it should be a breeze for you.
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