Published on May 22, 2015
Ideally, you’d design a website from top to bottom without budget in mind. You could make each page unique and lengthy and full of surprising little details.
But, we get it: sometimes client budgets are tight and you have to design “economically”.
Here are some tips for doing just that in your PSD to HTML and PSD to WordPress projects:
1. Make inner pages the same layout
Our base prices for inner pages is $99 (+/- depending on complexity).
But… There’s a loophole!
Did you know if you send us a 5-page website, and 4 of those pages are the exact same layout, just with different images & text, you don’t get charged anywhere near $99 for each of those pages?
That’s because once we code the page and form the HTML structure and CSS classes, it’s just a matter of copy / pasting in text and applying the right tags to it, like <h1>, <p>, etc., and inserting images.
Copy / pasting text is a whole lot easier and quicker than coding from scratch, so it makes sense that we wouldn’t charge full price for it. Fair enough? 🙂
Now, if you’re concerned with the website feeling “boring” because of this, ease your mind. Changing up images and text can make two pages that are the same in structure feel completely unique.
These two pages from our website are a great example:
The only differences in these two pages are: header image, testimonials, background color of sub-heads, and the actual text.
The structures are 100% identical though.
However, if you have a larger website, say 12 pages, than making 10 or 11 in the same structure can start to feel redundant. You can easily resolve this by making 3 or 4 page layouts that are each used 3-4 times.
That way you still save big, and your site still feels alive and dynamic.
This tip especially goes for WordPress, where duplicating page layouts is very easy. In fact, it’s as easy as clicking the “New Page” button.
So if budget is tight, re-use page layouts when you can. It really saves a lot.
2. Add content yourself
Let’s go back to that 5-page example from the last tip.
Say you have a home page with a unique design, and an inner page layout that gets used for the remaining 4 pages.
If you know basic HTML / CSS, you can easily edit our files and add in the text / images yourself to those inner pages.
We’d hand you a nicely coded home page and inner page. Then you could simply duplicate the inner page a bunch of times and add in all of your content as needed.
The inner page we hand you would be a perfect example to follow, too. So there’s really no guesswork. It’s very “plug and play”.
Again, this too especially goes for WordPress, where adding in conent is so easy. Especially because we typically custom-code each page to make editing it really darn easy. Take advantage of this simplicity and add basic text / images in yourself.
It might take more time, but it sure saves a lot of money.
3. Limit JavaScript, and Re-Use What You Can
JavaScript can really add up. If each page has unique animations, hover effects, sliders, etc., that can easily add anywhere from $45 to $100s to your project.
So if budget is tight, here are two tips:
- Try to be super discerning about where JS is an unneeded “decoration”, and where it actually contributes to the functionality and usability of your website. Most of the time it’s just “cool”, but not really necessary 🙂 We’re 100% guilty of this too at times, so no judgement here 🙂
-
Re-use what you can.
For example, if you have a big call-to-action button with a JS hover effect… re-use that same button on multiple pages rather than designing a unique one for each page.
Or… If there are a few pages that need to feature a slider… use the same slider on each of those pages if possible.
Making even small changes to elements like sliders and galleries can mean having to re-code them from scratch, which adds to cost. So if you can re-use the same elements, it’ll really help with budget constraints, because we can re-use the code.
Curious about what a PSD to HTML or WordPress project would cost? Send it in for a free quote!
We’d love to help 🙂 And if you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to send us an email or leave a comment below.
This post was last updated on September 19, 2019
