You want to get the most out of your website budget?

Here are some tips of squeezing more from your website budget without affecting the quality of your online promotional activities or increasing operational risks….

Website spending – no license fees!

Annual license fees can take up a big portion of your website budget without giving you additional benefits. However, based on our experience, the trend is for organisations across Europe to give serious consideration website content management systems (CMS) where there are no license fees, so called “open source” systems. These system now offer the same/or even better scalable and easy to use facilities with reliable support. This can free up a considerable part of your budget. Examples of good open source CMS are Drupal, Joomla and MySource Matrix. Intendance recommends MySource Matrix as it is supported by commercially available service level agreements by the software developers.

With a license based CMS, the budget of just maintaining the same system during a period of three years – without even considering improving it according to your evolving requirements – can end up to be considerable spending, which could be eliminated! 

Design spending

A poor website design will directly effect how many visitors stay on your site. However, a good website design does not have to cost an arm and a leg. The cost of a good design varies according to a variety of components.

The lack of integration of offline and online promotional activities often results in extra spending. When considering a new design for any on and offline promotional materials, you have to take into consideration how it can be implemented on all marketing documents so that designs can be evolved without changing them completely.

If you want to experiment with a new design then think of building micro sites. The design of the micro site can take elements of your main design so creating a new look and feel that is appropriate for the given topic of the micro site.

If you are thinking about building a new website then ensure your content management system is able to implement new designs without having to rebuild the whole site. If it is not the case, you will need to spend extra budgets on rebuilding the site every time you refresh your design, which is obviously not the most cost effective solution.

Google analytics and ad word campaigns – Google is your friend

Visitor tracking and Google rankings can be crucial for any marketing and business development activities. Be aware, that costly visitor tracking software does not necessarily provide you with more and better quality data than other free software. Intendance recommends Google Analytics as it provides all the information that a marketing or business development person will need. It produces great reports, easy to use graphs and above all it is FREE!

AdWord campaigns depend on your practice area and keywords profile can be very expensive marketing tools. Unless it is done consistently and professionally, and more importantly in line with your overall website strategy, it can be a complete waste of money. If visitors get through to your website which does not meet their expectations (design, information, navigation etc) then the ad word campaigns does not work FOR you but AGAINST you.

Web 2.0

Interactive content is becoming increasingly popular. Can it save you money, give you a benefit or is it just technology for technology’s sake? At the moment the jury is still out. Web 2.0 technology (blogs, wickies, etc) take a lot of time to keep them up to date. You must measure the time taken against the benefits returned. Our best advice is don’t do it unless you are committed to putting in the time and resources needed to really make it work.