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Containing Costs on Your Website Project
Creating a website for your business can be one of the longest, most expensive projects you undertake this year. A website is essential for most businesses but building one may not be your area of expertise.
Like any other construction project, website creation has several moving parts and various stages that need to be timed properly to keep the project moving. Also like other construction projects, building a website can easily run longer and more expensive than you planned.
Managing the budget with a VA
One of the hardest parts of budgeting for a website is knowing exactly how much money you’ll need. When you bid out the project, you’ll find quotes vary by hundreds or thousands of dollars. What one developer claims to produce for $500, another developer will charge you $5,000 and still a third will tell you you don’t even need that feature.
As a successful business owner, you know that the first step in sticking to a budget is building a realistic project cost analysis and then maintaining the scope of the original project. Website development has a way of including logo and branding development and morphing into social media management. Before you know it, your project budget is just a distant memory and your stress level is rising with every new add-on.
Setting up and maintaining your website creation budget could be as easy as hiring the right virtual assistant for website development. A virtual assistant with web development experience could request quotes, compare them for like features, and help you decide what functionality your website really needs. Once you’ve decided which contractors to use, VA help can set up your budget, track progress, make milestone payments, and keep you updated.
Saving money on web content
An additional way of containing costs on your website development project is to create your own content. Web developers are all about coding, plug-ins, and functionality, but they are usually not writers and marketers, so they charge a premium for those services. You can save money on the website and maintain control over the final product by using a virtual assistant for website content development.
A virtual assistant can write the web content you need at a fraction of the price your web development contractor will charge. You might not think you need a lot of content, but you’ll be surprised once the project gets rolling. At the very least, you’ll need some description of your products or services, a story about your business and how it was established, and some good marketing content to let potential customers know why they should choose you over the other options.
The content of your website needs to reflect the values and flavor of your company and incorporate some intrigue to attract new clients. You would be the best person to write about your company because you know it so well, but you are not a writer, and you can’t take that much time away from running your business to write about it. A virtual assistant could dedicate as much time as necessary to developing content for your website and would be able to take an objective look at your business. A virtual assistant would also be able to put in the time researching your competition to figure out how to make your website stand out.
Between managing the budget and creating web content, hiring virtual assistants can make your website creation project less expensive and therefore less stressful. You need this website to grow your business, and now you wish you had built it sooner.