Do Your Homework

Come to the table with a clear vision of your intended audience and what you want your site to do for them. Maintaining your focus on your users and your goals will help you to separate the cake from the icing as you think of new things to do on your site. Just remember that the icing comes last. Nothing is more expensive than allowing your mind to wander during production.

Spend some time on the net and keep a list of the sites that you visit. Take a few minutes to write down the things you like and don't like about each site. After a while, you'll notice that your list starts to form a set of general rules. The list of things that you dislike should be especially important to your developers. It will provide them with the opportunity to avoid spending your money developing concepts that you're going to hate, yet it will still give them plenty of maneuvering room.

Run the Numbers

Break your budget down into components and decide how much you want to spend on each element of your project. This will help you to keep an eye on your progress and set priorities when it comes time to decide whether or not to spend the money on that extra graphic. Try not to get too hypnotized by the new technologies available on the net. While some of the new plug-ins and helpers, like the VRML and video viewers, are pretty dazzling, many of them require the kind of high-speed connection and hot rod computer that only power surfers are likely to have. It also tends to be expensive to animate graphics and generate content for video-based formats. Remember, if you want to show a piece of video on a browser, first it has to be written, produced, shot, edited, and then formatted for the net. This kind of decision has to be evaluated carefully, or your could find yourself spending 20% of your production budget to reach 1% of your audience.

Start with the Shell

Once you've found what you think is a good solution to a problem, mock it up, install it in one place, and move on to something else. Eventually you will wind up with a working shell which you can polish before you fill in the details. For instance, if you are developing a format for your catalog, put the information for one page or a few key sections on the screen and move on. Changes in the engine room, where the bulk of the programming and all the database calculations are happening, tend to be more expensive to create than cosmetic changes to the 'dashboard' that faces the user, so it's a good idea to test the interface for usability before you build the entire back end. While this sounds like obvious advice, you'd be surprised at how many people will try to complete one section of their site without seeing how it relates to the whole.

Think Modular

Try to find formatting solutions that work as cookie cutters. For instance, rather than creating separate graphics for the masthead of each section, try to combine graphic elements in ways that can give you a custom look using a minimal set of re-usable parts. This approach saves a lot of money in development time, gives your site a cohesive look, and makes your pages load faster, because once an element is in your viewer's cache file, it doesn't have to be downloaded across the network again. This is going to be especially important if your site contains large graphic elements. Despite the widespread availability of DSL, many people still have 56k dialup connections. Your audience will quickly become frustrated if you make them wait too long to see what you have to say.  While there are literally hundreds of ways to save your production money, it's difficult to make useful suggestions without knowing what it is that you want to do.

When working with clients, we almost always insist that they at least give us a budget range. While we will be happy to work within your budget, we must know what it is. By providing us with a real budget number, you can save us the considerable time, effort, and embarrassment of developing a proposal for an elaborate site which is clearly beyond what you had intended. By providing us with a budget range, you will help us to define the features which can be included in the core site, and prioritize a list of peripheral features which will be added to the wish list for development in a later phase. Although most features can be added without major changes to the core site, there are usually some items on the wish list that can be implemented more easily with advanced planning. Building the foundation for future key elements into the infrastructure of the core site can greatly reduce the possibility that it will later have to be scrapped and rebuilt in order to add features.

If you're starting a project and you'd like to know more about how Blink Designworks can improve you image on the net, call us at 773.508.0436.