Pay Once For It Now Or Pay Twice For It Later?

When considering the goals for the website you are engaging your web development company to build for you, one of the considerations, perhaps one of the biggest, is price. Those who run or represent a business must always consider what is best value for the NOW. Whilst this is important, you may end up saving yourself a significant amount of money by considering early on what is best value for the LATER.

Where do you see your website in 6 months? 18 months? More importantly, where do you see your business in relation to your website? There are many upgrades you can do to a site once it has proven its worth, but when you anticipate in advance that the website will suit its initial purpose admirably you should consider some pre-emptive upgrades that will ultimately save you money (and time).

Multi-lingual support

Does your business operate in more than one country, or is your audience of a significantly varied ethnic background? The temptation to quickly launch the first version of your website in English only may ultimately cost you a lot more later on than you would imagine. By building in to the initial specifications that the site will need to support other languages then the navigation and storage requirements required to support non-English character sets can be factored in early. The developer can anticipate that every field on every form and every link on every page will need the ability to be translated into more than one language. By building the foundation for this in the beginning, even if you will only have English content prepared, will definitely save you time and money should you decide to go down this path at a later date.

Search Engine Optimisation

One of the things Wiliam are most proud of is our search engine optimisation techniques. It is not merely enough to put your website onto the World Wide Web and give out your address to colleagues of advertise yourself on other sites. Most traffic to your website will be from search engines and it is incredibly important to design your website in a way that makes it easier for search engines to digest and index your content. Insist from the beginning that your website is SEO friendly and you will have less work to do later on. Techniques such as ‘friendly URLs’ - that is, addresses that use descriptive words such as www.yoursite.com/products/hampers/christmas rather than simply www.yoursite.com/product.aspx?id=24  as well as meaningful meta descriptions and keywords and appropriate use of HTML tags greatly enhance the success of engines returning results to the end user searching for your products. Building in to the initial phase of your project the support for these technologies means that when it comes time to improve your rank on Google the framework is already in place for it.

Content managed vs. static content

Any good development firm will offer you a CMS (content management system)  as part of the overall package; however it is worth asking your developer what content you will be able to manage. Will your website send emails? If so, will you want the ability to change the content of the emails? You may think that this is a simple consideration however if you get asked for the content for your email at some point during development do not be surprised if it ends up hard-coded in the site code. This will more than likely cost you money to change at a later date, so spend the money early on to give yourself the ability to change anything and everything you imagine you will want to keep fresh.

Considering these points (and there are others) in the early stages of your project life cycle will ultimately save you time and money later. Increasing your initial timeline by two weeks may also be easier with regards to scheduling your project amongst the other clients committed to your web developer whereas finding four weeks after the build has been complete may be much harder.

Initially your time and financial spend may be greater, but the costs of adding on crucial functionality after the completion of your site will be more than it would have been had you thought the options through first.