The Digital Budget Checklist.

It may not be quite the federal budget but getting a costing overview for the next digital project and sticking within those parameters is rarely plain sailing. The amount of variables involved in the digital realm are many, and a lot of them are external to your control. So planning is the lucrative word at stake and it is not to be underestimated.

When either quoting or budgeting your website there are question you need to ask yourself and your team.

Who has the money?

If dealing with a client you need to assess the relative size of their business to the functionality they can both afford and require. A multi million dollar solution is both lost and unnecessary for a boutique start up, and the opposite is true as well. In the happy case of a client having the means and the need for a grand solution you need to provide it without underselling your teams skills to get the job. In most cases larger companies are happy to pay for a solid solution rather than skimp a few dollars and be uncertain of the outcome. In my experience provided you are transparent and well documented, larger companies will pay for the knowledge that your team is the best possible means to get the job done.

Functionality and Technical Specifications

Websites are evolving mediums and with each project often you can find yourself pushing the boundaries as to what is possible to create online. The best way to counteract this obstacle is by documenting functionality to the nth degree, mainly in the form of wire framing and functionality specifications (func specs). This gives your designer and developers a clear overview about what is going to be achieved, every step of the way. It also provides a document as to exactly the types of technology to be used whether it be proprietary or open source and what costs this incurs.

Budget Timings; Who your team is and what do they need?

Functionality specs and wire framing will also equip your designers and developers with the information they need to make decisions about their technical and time requirements. Particularly in the case of developers, people external to their knowledge would struggle to assess what is truly required to create a websites technical infrastructure.

Being able to breakdown your teams timings into an hourly rate and converting that to budget timings is pretty crucial to maintaining budget scope. Particularly having the technical knowledge to ascertain as to how feasible this is. In the case of a producer not having this knowledge it is important to have great communication within the team.

Externalities.

If something is outside of your control it is very good to be aware of it in order to minimize the possibilities of it impacting your project. In the digital realm the main elements that can throw a spanner in the works are as follows.

• Browser compatibility and limitations
• Third party software restrictions or changes to software outside of your control.
• Hosting issues if servers not kept in house
• Payment gateways and credit card security for e-commerce
• Changes in technology rendering some things obsolete. Flash and iphone compatibility is an excellent example of this.
• New technology that has either not undergone stringent testing or unfamiliar to the developer. This can be quite common with new e-commerce platforms that take longer to develop initially.

Client input

Everyone who has either freelanced or worked within production agencies has an opinion on client input, but the client is integral to all our businesses and it can't always be an us vs them scenario. Whilst the client shouldn't be treated as an ignoramus bad guy it is important to keep the project well documented and have milestones signed off by the client authority in order to prevent back steps and unnecessary detours along the journey. It is not uncommon for a client to suddenly request a complete back flip on functionality, and it is always powerful to have a signed off document that can either annul the whimsy or deem it outside of scope and thus budget.

Other important nuggets for consideration.

Website content - Is the client supplying and creating using a content management system or will the site be delivered populated with the content in it's entirety.

Advertising - Is there a part of the budget allocated to advertising the site and directing traffic towards it. This is also inclusive of considerations of SEO. Depending on the nature of the project sometimes it is cleaner to present this element as a separate project budget.

Payment Gateways - In the case of an e-commerce site there are many layers of fees associated with the use of various payment gateways that need to be taken into account.

Hosting - Whilst hosting is usually not a large portion of a sites budget, if a site becomes immensely popular or requires an extreme amount of bandwidth it is perhaps necessary to investigate dedicated server hosting, which can become costly.

Stock photography or shoot requirements.

Some important phases to take into account when creating a budget.

• Research and planning
• Solution design
• Design
• Front-end development
• Back-end development
• Content entry
• Testing
• Go-live