All agencies want to work with the high profile clients with their abnormally large budgets. You have room to stretch your strategic, design muscles and create something that wins the awards.
However, there are client-friends that come along once in a while that need a very simple, clean and quick site redesign. On a budget.
With these types of projects you obviously attempt to prune the overhead as much as possible. This means less time thinking strategically about the brand, less time working with the client to massage messaging and design direction and less people on the project. We’re talking about a straight forward template that gets the job done.
Websites are a commodity. Everyone including their pet has one. There are countless services that allow you to easily create your own site and have it up and running in a very short amount of time. Creating a businesses website is a bit different from a personal site though. It needs to be unique to that business and it’s audience.
The most recent example was a site built on Drupal (the popular open-source CMS.) We concentrated on re-organizing the content and creating a theme. Our junior designer came up with some very nice, clean designs. The templates did a great job of providing flow for the information hierarchy but lacked any unique design elements that differentiated this site from the plethora of template sites already out there. I challenged him to find a unique style that fit the companies personality.
Finding the site’s unique style can be achieved in many ways. Some examples include using a particular style of photography or illustration, developing an iconography system and even bold use of typography. Even though you’re on a budget you still want to provide visual queues that you’ve come to the right place.
A few budget-conscious resources we use here are:
- Shutterstock – They have several subscription plans or you can buy packs of stock. This site has a very extensive library of textures, vector art, and photography. I will say, if you are looking for photography with people in it you may want to use a different service.
- iStockPhoto – When you need people focused photography this site has a large database to search from. Pricing works on a credit system and has several licensing options.
- Typekit – If you’re using typography as your defining style this hosted font service is extensive, reasonably priced and light-weight. They’re constantly working with foundries to add typefaces.
I hope these tips and resources help with your own small budget site. I’d love to hear about other services that you use on these types of projects so leave your favorites in the comments.
