5 Ways to Reduce the Cost of a New Website

There are five key ways to reduce the cost of a new website. Let's explore each of them.

Reducing the scope

The easiest way to reduce the cost of your new website is to simply reduce the scope by removing sections of content or entire pages. For example, if you want a website with an events page and don't plan on holding any more than five total events per year, then it doesn't make sense to invest in that feature.

We're usually not super keen to do this as you've figured out the sitemap already and you have a story you want to tell, so the solutions below are probably better.

Preparing your strategy in advance

It's more common than you might think to not know the content of your website until after we've started designing it. This is a great way for us to come up with creative solutions that work within an agreed budget, but if you're new to web design this can be frustrating.

To avoid this happening, try creating some wireframes or a sitemap before getting in touch and give us as much information about what will go on the site so we can quote accordingly.

At Jellypepper, we have a list of things we typically figure out during a website strategy workshop. You can browse these concepts and figure them out internally.

Combining low-content pages

One of the bigger cost factors is unique templates. Rather than splitting content into low-quantity pages, we could combine them into a longer form page that optimises for quality and experience over quantity and takes your audience of a journey through your site, rather than constantly clicking around.

If you have multiple pages that don't require high amounts of content, then it's often a good idea to combine them into one. A good use case for this is the About pages or, more likely, the Careers pages. We will still need the same amount of visual assets (minus 1 or 2 depending on how they're merged) but in the case of Careers, it saves on an entire template.

Using structured templates

Using the same high-level structure for multiple pages with the same intent allows for launching new pages and scaling easier, as well as much faster development. A good use case for this are a Product or Service page. When you have multiple product pages, they typically follow a pretty similar pattern so we can immediately cut out a whole slew of unique templates and just focus on what's different in the middle, which saves time.Another good example are legal pages — they're just static content pages so easily repeatable.

Knowing the actual content

As most websites are scoped off a basic sitemap, the estimate needs to be conservative and it's assumed every page is large and unique. We'd rather overestimate at this point than underestimate and be potentially misleading. If we find out there's less content per page, it immediately cuts down the time to design and build. A great example for this is the Contact page — if we know for a fact it's super short, simple and beautiful, it saves us a lot of guesswork.

Reducing the upfront cost of a new website through thoughtful planning frees up a lot more budget for creative assets later on, which can really help your website's new design.