If you're a small business owner, you scrutinize every dollar that leaves your bank account and make sure that you will have a strong return on that investment. With credit still in the dumps and margins low, you can't afford to throw away money - as if you could have just two years ago. Now that you need a website, you cringe every time you get a quote or proposal. And you do not want to risk quality or wasting money (no matter how little) by working with an overseas design chop-shop. So, what can you do to save money on your website design costs?

Be Prepared

The absolute best thing you can do to save money on your website is to be prepared. If you have content completed internally and you have a clear idea of the look and focus of your website, this will save your designer time and keep your cost down. Tell your designer up front that you've done the research and the competitive analysis and you have a very good idea of the strategic direction of your website. Tell him that all the copy is complete and that you just need a website to pour it in.

Now, of course, it's best to work with a designer and copywriter on the copy, to make sure it's in the proper format and has all the keywords you need and in the right place. It's also great to have a professional work with you to come up with the site architecture. If you don't mind spending a little to double-check what you've done yourself, it will still be cheaper than hiring a copywriter and art director to do everything from scratch.

Stock Photography

As a designer, I relish the opportunity to work with professional photography! It's great to work with a photographer and brainstorm ideas for a shoot and the type of imagery that would work best. However, that adds significant cost to a project. Instead, see what you can do with stock photography. My personal opinion is cheap stock photography is still better than amateur point-and-shoot.

Talk to your designer about how you can convey an idea to represent your message through a metaphor, and see if you can block out an idea using stock photography. For example, see what I did for JEP of Westchester. Since they lacked the resources for a photographer, we were able to nail down that what they did was enlighten adults through education. An image of an open book was the perfect metaphor for that concept. See it here.

Kill the features!

Feature creep is when you add more features than necessary throughout the project, which kills momentum, costs more, and eventually, the project will be an unorganized mess. Make sure you have a clear goal of your website, and make sure the features you want are requested up-front, before design has begun. Then, stick to your guns. Don't add to the list! Have a great idea? Keep in mind, that continuing the brainstorming process during the design of your site will slow down the construction and likely, it is not necessary to accomplish the goals previously laid down.

It's really common these days to include a Facebook and Twitter feed into your website. But why bother? Have a link so people can follow you on those social networks and save the cost of the extra functionality of having the live feed.

Further, see if you can get away with using out-of-the-box features. Sure, there might be some really great things you'd like to implement, but customization costs money. "Out of the box" specifications will significantly reduce your cost, as well as make for a much faster production time.

Skip the logo for now

I am not going to eschew benefit of a solid brand identity. However, it may be possible to put off creating your new logo. If you're a startup, your brand will likely be changing as your company evolves and solidifies its focus. That way, you won't be investing lots of money in building brand equity into a logo that will need to be changed, anyway. It might be possible to simply go with a basic type-treatment and get your website up immediately. As your website and business take off, you can put in the proper funds to create your logo. At that stage, you'll also have a better idea how you'd like to be positioned in the market place.

Are you sure you know what you need?

Rather than calling a designer with a list of features you need on your new website, tell your designer your business and the goals you expect to accomplish on the web. Ask for a recommendation of the best way to spend your money online to maximize your investment.

On one recent call from a prospective client, I was asked to quote out an ecommerce solution. I was given all these guidelines and requirements which would require lots of custom coding. I had a ballpark idea of what it would cost, but since I already knew that this was a startup, I knew the price was out of her league. And the truth is, it wasn't necessary.

She had been looking at other existing players in the field and wanted a website with a similar feature set. However, after asking her specific questions which targeted her business organization, I pointed out that she wasn't ready to launch a website which such a long feature list. I told her it would be best to focus on her core business, which required customized ordering, which could easily be done by telephone, but not so easily done in a regular ecommerce system. I told her to continue taking orders by phone, and use the web as a marketing tool, not as a way to process sales. It would save her many thousands of dollars, and as her business grew, she would be able to determine the best way to organize her business online.

There's no limit to what a website can cost! A website can literally cost millions of dollars with a large research team, big enough feature list and tight enough timeline. Maximize your investment, and when your business takes off, you can feel better about beefing up your online presence!