Reconciling your wants, your needs, and your budget

When it’s time to get a new website, the first thing people do is look at other websites to see what kind of things they would like on their website. You might look around at your competitors, random websites, and just see things you like, and make a list of the things you like.

Next, you’ll probably contact a few web designers or developers, people who have been referred to you or ones you find through your online searches. You’ll give them a brief overview of your thoughts, and they might send you a quote. Or they might ask more questions.

I always ask more questions.

I don’t really want to know what “features” you want (yet). What I want to know is, what are your website goals? What do you hope to achieve by creating a new website or revamping the current website? How will you evaluate if that goal is being met?

Your website needs should always come before fancy features.

One of the things that many people don’t understand is that many fancy features also come with a fancy price tag. But more importantly, more often than not, those wanted fancy features are unnecessary. They often won’t help you meet your website goals.

Before you start any new project, you need to ask yourself what your goals are, and how each feature you request will help you meet those goals. If those two answers don’t correlate, then you need to rethink your plan.

There was a time, years ago when we were new to this business, that everyone wanted a splash page with a Flash intro. Everyone would ask us for that. At the time, we were young and new to the business, so we didn’t always question it like we should have. But the problem is that the splash page almost never helps a website. You have to click to get past it, it doesn’t usually reveal any helpful menu or have any kind of navigation. Why did everyone want one? Because it was flashy and trendy. Nobody considered that it actually wasn’t helping their business.

And this is a big problem. Now, very few people ask me for Flash anymore. (And we just don’t do that anyway.) But this example can relate to to a lot of website wishes. What do you want your user to do? How are we going to get them to do it? And will the fancy feature request help?

If you want the fancy features, and you have the budget for it, then that’s awesome! Let’s do it! But more often than not, those fancy features you see on websites belong to big budget websites. We specialize in small business websites, so frequently, our clients don’t have the budget for those kinds of fancy features.

It is extremely important that you balance all three of these aspects, and not focus on one single aspect. If you focus on finding the spot in the center of those three rings, you’ll be the happiest and have the best results.

This is not to say you can’t have an awesome website even without the fanciest features. It all depends on your goals. For us, at Sumy Designs, our goal is to get more traffic to our site, get users to want to hire us, and get people to contact us through our quote request form. Could we have a fancier website? Sure. But that would be for fun and aesthetics… it’s not necessary for achieving the goals we want.

Need help aligning your wants and needs with your budget? We can help you identify your website goals so you can hit that sweet spot in the middle. Contact us today for a quote.