Many think that if you have a very modest budget for a website, expect poor results.  This simply is not true, If you’re willing to get “un-creative.”  Rather than turn away a local volunteer organization, we put our creative ideas on pause and went for simple, fast, and free.Joe Paternoster asked me to revamp ShawneeKiwanis.org.  As always, we took some time to discover Joe’s needs for this relatively simple site:

• clean design, positive vibe, very easy to use
• photos should display well and load very easily!
• Back end CMS to support multiple authors… none of which are computer savvy
• Clean code that’s accessible and search engine friendly.

The budget for this project was $250. This budget is 0.5% of where most of our sites start in price, so we had some problems:

• Budget doesn’t cover even one of our six phases of developing a site!
• Even if I did the design for FREE, there is no budget for coding it to work with our CMS (content management system), no room for custom development work, and no time for or Search Engine Optimization.

In reality, even if they increased their budget by 1000%, (which would be $2500), that’s just not enough to do almost any custom designed and developed site.

We could have told this customer to go somewhere else… maybe to a “low end” web designer, a high school student, or call up one of those family relatives who always say they’ll do your site but never really get around to it.  But I wanted to do this favor for Joe, so I took a moment to think about solutions.  The only option was to think of tools that already exist (and are free) that can meet the goals for this site?

How can you create a nice site for $250? Yes, but it’s less about creating and more about “combining” a few different free items from various corners of the web. Here’s what we did:

• The only real “work” was the famous 5 minute install of Wordpress, our chosen CMS.
• Next we grabbed the pretty Beach House theme from Dan Masters.
• I located some nice photography options to make a customized header.
• With the design done, we turned our attention to photos. The obvious solution was to get Lightbox working in Wordpress. That *might* have taken 5 minutes!
• Add a change of servers, dns settings, email, and stats, and we were 90% done.
• Wordpress has built in options for very pretty and accessible URL’s. If you want more, use one of the free plugins to develop a Google Sitemap for your site.
• I spent about 25 minutes on the phone with the client, showing him how to use Wordpress.

How did we do on delivering a nice site for a modest budget? Well I have three total hours into the Shawnee Kiwanis site, so check it out and let me know what you think.

For those of you who are aware of all of the resources we used: It’s true, we didn’t really “Design” or “Develop” anything. We provided none of our normal web services. Plus, in the interest of a cheap site, a person with no real computer knowledge can sign up for hosting somewhere with a one click install of Wordpress. They can have search for a theme that suits them. They can download a FTP client like SmartFTP and learn how it works. They can read documentation or support forums to learn how to upload their theme. They can search forums and other blogs about plugins to help with other needs for the site. They can download an illegal copy of Photoshop or Fireworks to create a custom header graphic (as the cost of these apps blows the total project budget), or they could try to do it in software they already have… which would be nearly impossible unless they are a MAC user. However, would all of this really be worth it for most people…all to save less than $250?

I’m happy with the results, mostly because this site was done on less than 5% of where most of my projects start, and the site looks and works nicely.  By taking this “un-creative” approach, I didn’t have to turn away this customer.  Most importantly, it does what the Shawnee Kiwanis club needs it to do.
What do you think of the results?
Click below and feel free to leave your comments!