Even when the economic situation is shiny, cost reduction and efficiency improvement are important when designing web sites for a client. While it is not recommendable to make cost savings at the expense of quality, there are many ways in which you can achieve cost reduction and efficiency improvements and still design a top-notch site.

Get Shared Hosting for Your Client

One of the obvious ways to reduce costs and improve efficiency when web designing for a client is to get shared hosting for them. Web hosting costs are recurring costs and as a result they are one of the best candidates for optimization. Dedicated web hosting is great but only for enormous sites with a lot of traffic.

Since a new site will hardly have millions of visitors a month, the best you can do is get cheap website hosting. Later, if the site becomes a high traffic one, you can easily move to more expensive website hosting packages.

Pick a Reliable but Cheap Website Hosting

When we recommend to pick cheap website hosting, this doesn’t mean that you should pick the cheapest offer without paying attention to the quality of service this website hosting provider offers. Today there are many great cheap website hosting offers and if you don’t know how to pick one there are plenty of articles on that will help you. On the other hand, extremely cheap webhosting also comes at a price, so you need to find the balance between quality and cost.

Use Ready Templates

Many website hosting providers offer free web site builders or ready templates you can use in your designs. If you don’t see such goodies listed in the features list of your webhosting package, ask your webhosting provider if they offer them. If your webhosting provider doesn’t offer them, most likely you will be allowed to use third-party website builders or website templates. Search the web and see what you can find.

Use Open Source Software

Similarly to free web site builders and free templates, many web hosting companies run on open source software. Open source software is great not only because as a rule it is free (though you can make a donation to the development team, if you like) but because it is also very reliable.

Similarly to webhosting costs, software licensing costs tend to be recurring costs. This is why it is best if you select open source software – you will not pay initial fees and you will not pay subscription fees later. Anyway, Linux, PHP, MYSQL, Apache and the other similar open source technologies are what powers the Net, so if you have worries that these products are not of high quality because they are free, your worries are in vain.

As you see, there are ways in which you can design a high quality site and keep the costs under control. The most important steps in that direction are to get shared webhosting, to pick reliable but cheap webhosting, and to use ready templates/open source software your webhosting provider most likely offers. If you follow these steps, your clients will be happy.