4 Ways to Reduce Your Web Design Bill

Hiring a web designer doesn't have to be expensive. Here are some tips to help you reduce your final web design bill:

1. Use pre-designed templates- Instead of hiring a designer to design and build an entire website from scratch, pick up a pre-designed template and have your designer customize it. Your designer should also be able to put the template on your server and show you how to update it yourself. If you plan on taking this route, you'll need to take some time in finding a template to use. Be sure that the template looks as close to what you want your website to look like so you can keep the customizations to the template to a minimum. You'll be defeating the purpose of using a template if you have the designer alter it completely.
   
2. Have your designer create a custom template- If you already have some experience with working on websites another money saving alternative is to hire a designer to create a custom template for your site instead of creating the whole site. The way it would work is that your designer would custom design one or two pages of your website and then hand over those pages to you. You would then take those pages and build the rest of the site by copying the template to make additional pages and inputting your content yourself.
   
   This is a good solution if you already know your way around a web page editor like Dreamweaver or FrontPage but your design skills are a bit lacking. This is also a good compromise if you don't like the idea of buying a generic template and would prefer a custom design.
   
3. Look into free open source software- If you need a shopping cart or blog or a forum for your website, you're in luck. There's a whole library of excellent software that you can use on your website for free. There's a class of software on the market called "open source" because the code or the "guts" of the software is literally "open"…for users to view and use it. Some open source software is available for people to use for free. This includes some shopping carts, forums, blogs, and other types of software for websites. You can ask your designer or developer to install software for you and it will still be much cheaper than hiring them to build it from scratch.
   
   Even better, some web hosting companies also bundle these programs in with their standard web hosting packages and may even provide an easy install feature which allows you to choose which software you want to install and then takes you step by step through the installation process. Often, all you need to do is press a few buttons.
   
4. Take advantage of remotely hosted services- Instead of installing a blog or shopping cart on your website, consider using a remotely hosted service instead. How these services work is that you sign up, the service provides you with a bit of code that you put on your web pages and boom! You have your own blog or shopping cart without the hassle of installing it yourself or without the cost of hiring your designer or developer to do it for you.
   
   You'll need to give up a certain amount of flexibility in how the service runs, what it looks like and the features you have available for your website. Also, while many of these services have a free version available, in order to get to the really good features you may have to pay a monthly fee. Using a remotely hosted service is a good choice if you want to get something set up fast with a minimum of hassle and if you don't want to put out a large amount of cash at the very beginning.

Now that you have some handy strategies for saving on your web designer bill, you'll need to know how to find a designer that will fit your budget. Click here to learn how.

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