In the Web world, hearing businesses and freelancers alike complain about low-budget projects is not too uncommon. Let’s say that a local coffee shop needs to update its Web presence and contacts you for a redesign. It also requires a blog so that it can announce new coffees, events and so on. However, during the course of the first meeting, the client mentions that they don’t have a budget.

Being the inquisitive businessperson that you are, you say, “Well, we work with budgets of almost any size. What price range were you thinking of?” The owner of the coffee shop reveals that he has only $1500 to spend on the website. Thinking it would be a waste of time, you walk away.

This is where our design studio found ourselves. We had potential projects all over the place, but the budgets were all smaller than we thought we could handle. In the Web world, demand for small websites is up. There are always start-up companies and small businesses around that need some form of a Web presence. And, as a Web design community, our job is to answer those needs in the most utilitarian way possible.

We began questioning our business practices. We knew that there was money to be made on smaller projects, but it wasn’t until we sat down and did some simple math that we realized the business opportunity we had been missing.

Here’s the simple premise on which we began to transform our business: if you turn away 10 to 15 small projects a year at $1500 per project, that’s declining between $15,000 and $22,500 every year.

Our company was a start-up business once, too, and it still is. Perhaps we were delusional in our belief that big projects grow on trees. We were struggling to find work. It became clear to us that we needed to take a serious look at our business practices, our development and design processes, and ourselves. We needed to find a way to make money. Let’s take a few minutes to discuss how we overhauled our operations and started making a living off of small projects.

 

It’s All About The Process

As a Web community, we are well equipped to handle any low-budget projects that come our way. We have more frameworks and streamlined solutions than we’ve ever had access to in the past, such as WordPress, HTML5 Boilerplate and ThemeForest. Learning how to leverage these tools is key to understanding how to make money on small projects. And mastering these tools gives us the flexibility to stray from cookie-cutter solutions.

However, before you decide to take on a workload filled with small projects, let’s stress a key point. Some clients are extremely demanding about their design process and the functionality of their websites. Be careful to set clear boundaries with the client so that you don’t end up working for less than minimum wage. We’ll cover a few techniques for this below.

Over the years, we’ve picked up knowledge from many different sources. One of the best summaries of how we try to systematize our own workflow comes from Bill Beachy over at Go Media. He recently released a short podcast episode discussing business systems, which I strongly encourage you to check out.

But first, let’s look quickly at the various methods we use to cut down on our website build time.

 

Write Down Your Processes

During the course of working on projects, we’ve developed a master document that we call the Low-Budget Guide. It details every single step of building a website on a budget. We have sections on the fastest ways to deploy a test WordPress installation on various hosting providers, documentation on common WordPress settings, plugins and problems, as well our standard step-by-step process. We’ll review this process in a case study later in the article.

The Low-Budget Guide helps us address several important aspects of our work. First, it prevents us from forgetting to do anything. Having a step-by-step guide eliminates any errors that might cost several hours of development time.

 

 

Secondly, by having the Low Budget Guide, we’re able to review which processes are efficient and which are time-consuming. Using this standard, we can minimize build time by adjusting our processes in certain areas. We’re basically fine-tuning ourselves into the fastest website builders we can be. And lowering build time directly increases the profit margin.

Finally, it ensures quality. Having a repeatable process means that every time you follow the guide, you become more proficient. This not only increases the speed at which you work, but decreases deviation from a tried and true standard. Practice makes you a whole lot better.

 

Choose a Framework

… Or choose several frameworks and tailor them to specific website types. For example, if you want to quickly implement a custom design on a WordPress website, check out Carrington JAM (short for “just add markup”). It’s a blank slate for custom WordPress themes, with a lot of the heavy lifting already handled. I personally use a version of Carrington JAM that I’ve converted to HTML5.

If you’re not using WordPress, I would recommend looking into the HTML5 Boilerplate. If you’re adventurous, you can apply the Boilerplate to a Drupal, Joomla or ExpressionEngine theme. Then, when you deploy the content management system, your front-end framework will already be in place. Django is another fantastic and fast framework, if you’re familiar with Python.

 

Use a Theme

There’s no shame in using a pre-built theme to construct a website for a client. In fact, you should be proud of doing so if the budget demands it. Using a theme can cut build time by at least half, if not more. Instead of spending 30 hours coding a website, you would be spending 15 hours fine-tuning a theme, tailoring it to your client’s branding and inserting content. At $1500, you’d be getting paid $100 per hour. How, from a business perspective, would turning an opportunity like that down be considered a good decision?

That being said, always follow the licensing agreement that comes with your theme. Honest people put hours of effort into building themes. Never, never, never break the copyright, and always adhere to intellectual property laws.

 

Work in a Modular Fashion

What exactly is modular coding? Looking at various websites, you’ll see that certain areas are common to all of them. WordPress serves as a good example of breaking a website down into “modules.”

At our studio, we have built a code library around modules. We have custom Twitter and Facebook widgets, custom post templates, image gallery widgets, the list goes on. When you write new code, think of it as a module that needs to be flexible enough to function on other websites with as little customization as possible. For example, instead of having to write an image slider from scratch, we’d be able to pop in a tiny PHP function, pass along a few variables, set a few styles in CSS, and we’d be done in less than 20 minutes.

Building a code library over months and years enables your business to cut down on major coding time. And if you refine the module every time you use it, you will ensure that the product grows ever higher in quality.

 

Get Familiar With Less

Less, in simple terms, makes CSS more like a coding language. We could argue whether style sheets should even do that, semantically speaking. But the fact of the matter is that it has shaved off at least 10% of the time that I spend writing CSS.

 

Perhaps one of my favorite features of Less is Mixins. These allow you to embed the CSS from one class into another. You can also use them as functions and allow them to take arguments. An example of this from Less’ website would be:

.rounded-corners (@radius: 5px) { border-radius: @radius; -webkit-border-radius: @radius; -moz-border-radius: @radius; } #header { .rounded-corners; } #footer { .rounded-corners(10px); }

 

Preventive Measures Save Time And Money

One of the bigger issues that we frequently ran into with clients was diverging expectations of what their money would get them. Business owners need to be honest and up front about everything, which we were.

Yet something still wasn’t clicking. We were seeing scope creep, delays in communication, hold-ups in payment, and clients who just weren’t satisfied. I was kept up nights thinking, “Is this seriously what the business world is like? I can’t do this for the rest of my life!”

And then I realized something: if this was a recurring problem, chances are it wasn’t the fault of my clients, but that I was to blame.

So, I started thinking. How could I prevent these problems from coming about?

Simply put, preventative measures turned out to be the key. Standardizing basic business practices for all of your clients will ensure that your projects run smoothly. By avoiding these headaches, businesses will be able to dedicate their time to what actually brings in money. The less time wasted on dealing with scope creep, bickering over payment, and addressing client dissatisfaction means more money saved and also a more enjoyable working environment.

 

Show Websites With Similar Budgets

This is one of the best ways to give clients a good idea of what their website will be. I’ve found that this method, more than any other, is the best way to prevent trouble down the road.

Have the Client Prioritize

During your initial meeting with a client, help them to list all of the functionality they would like to see on the website. After the list has been generated, put each feature into one of three categories: “Essential,” “Highly desirable” or “Bell ’n’ whistles.” This way, you will be able not only to determine what needs to get done, but to trim the project to fit the budget.

Tell Them What You Can’t Do

Be honest with the client. This will save countless hours of frustration if the client keeps changing their mind about a font or background color. Tell them up front that you cannot include a photo gallery for such a low price, or that a blog would simply take too much time for the budget. By stating it from the beginning, they won’t think they can just add it later on.

Sign a Contract, With an Accompanying Scope

Just. Do. It. By detailing what you will do and how long it will take, you’re again setting realistic expectations. A contract protects both you and the client. We strongly suggest “lawyering up” before you have to. Even if the lawyer is expensive, preparing a solid contract should cost between $300 and $1000. That’s a heck of a lot less than court fees; and having a lawyer on your side from the beginning tends to keep you out of court in the first place.

Charge for Missed Meetings

Ever since we started stating this clearly in the contract, do you know how many meetings our clients have missed? A grand total of zero! Over the course of six months, not a single person has missed a meeting. No more headaches, no more lost time. To top it off, our clients are even happier now because we’re not hassling them for having missed meetings. All we had to do was put a fee in the contract. It doesn’t have to be much: we charge $50 for the first missed meeting, and $100 for every one thereafter.

Handle Payments Better

For small projects, I strongly recommend requiring a down payment. Clients who have made a down payment are much more apt to pay on time and pay the right amount later on in the project when you’re hitting your milestones. So, save yourself some headaches and get a deposit.

Secondly, be clear in your contract and invoices about when payment is due. Inform clients of what will happen if they neglect to pay on time. Charge a late fee if a payment doesn’t come on schedule.

We strongly recommend late fees. However, if you do charge them, give clients a courtesy phone call a week before the due date to remind them of both the payment and the late fee. The fee doesn’t have to be much: ours is 10% of the remaining balance on the invoice.

 

Final Thoughts And Considerations

Obviously, we found these methods to work for us. Every project, client and situation is different. Use your judgment, and develop practices that fit your business’ style. If you’re a freelancer, do what fits your personality. Nothing is worse than trying to fit into someone else’s shoes.

Problems With a Streamlined Design Process

Needless to say, this particular approach to streamlined design has plenty of problems. Our biggest concern is that it takes a lot of the personality and art out of the work. Our passion for design is what drives us. Small projects tend to be much more rigid in their process, and we have to supplement them with work that allows our creativity to breathe.

With this process, we could also encounter issues with addressing the particular needs of clients. With budgets that are so low, not much time can be spent identifying the target audience, developing a unique design for the brand, or addressing any other things that are particular to your client’s situation. But we have found that, in most small projects, the client is never so demanding that you don’t have at least some time to address their concerns. In the case of Menno Tea, we had plenty of time to address their particular needs.

Finally, by no means do we wish to represent Web design as a cookie-cutter process. We hope this article serves as an overview of ways to cut down on cost and time, but never sacrifice too much of the organic and innovative processes required to be a quality Web worker. Whatever you do, don’t strip the soul out of design. Do what feels right. If you don’t feel right about your processes or feel confident that the client will be getting the quality that they’re paying for, then chances are you’re doing something wrong. After all, in order to succeed, you have to be true to yourself.

What Are Your Thoughts?

More importantly, what do you think about small projects? Are they worth taking on, or are they just too much of a hassle? How does a business handle a budget that isn’t ideal? And do you believe that providing low-cost solutions cheapens our work as designers and developers?