IHR - Managing the costs of your website development

No matter whether you are developing a small site or a large site, you can keep your development costs down if you follow these "management" tips:

Do this to keep costs down:	Because:
Provide one key contact person	If more than one key person to provides input, then IHR will have to spend additional time coordinating information and players.
Proactively manage the project	If IHR has to continually make followup reminders (via phone calls or emails), then this increases time and costs.
Use a reasonable timeline	If there are long time delays in your reviews of work, then costs will go up because IHR needs to re-review the relevant issues. A tight timeline increases costs for numerous reasons including: a) It requires tighter coordination which requires additional time (e.g., additional telephone calls), and b) There is little time to prioritize the work to define what is "out of budget" and what is "within budget."
Decide on one primary domain name and stick with that	If the Domain Name is changed during the development process, this requires additional time for Domain Name consultation, DNS changes, and changes to server configuration files. Also, the more domain names you want to hook up to your website, the higher the costs, since IHR will have do to more server work.
Provide your own staff to update your domain name DNS information	If you have access to update the DNS (Domain Name Services) for your Domain Name, you will save labor costs. If IHR has to make changes to your Domain Name and IHR has to do additional communication to find out how to make those changes, then your costs will go up.
Define your website look-and-feel before starting the project, and try to stick with that	As much as possible, if you can review other websites for look-and-feel features that you like before beginning work with the IHR graphic artist, then you can convey clearer messages and obtain demos that are more consistent with what you want. If you want IHR to create lots of additional demos, then costs will rise accordingly. Each additional look-and-feel demo can cost $100 to $500 each.
Develop a website plan, and try to stick with it	The more you change your website pages, navigation, etc, the higher the costs.
Send relevant photos to IHR	If your organization already has electronic images (e.g. staff pictures, cell photos, logo, etc.) that would work on your site, you can send those images to IHR. This will reduce your costs. If IHR creates or purchases images for you, then the costs will go up (cost of photos and labor to find the photos).
Batch your update requests, if possible	Avoid sending lots of small requests, as there is overhead for each request, including, for example, get oriented to website, set up the files, update, upload, review. This is more cost effective when changes are consolidated.
Provide "ready to go" text for your web pages	The more IHR is asked to continually make text changes to "already submitted" text, the more costs will go up.
Clearly identify specifically what you want done	The more IHR has to try to figure out what you want done, the more labor time.

Managing the Costs of Your Website Development

Managing the Costs
of Your Website Development