Website Brief #1: The Environmental Foundation
Group members:
Dynie Mesoneuvre
Mia Marquez
Laura Pineda
1. Budget Justification
After doing some research on salaries and rates based in the U.S., we found out that "the price
of a custom feature-rich website can go as high as $30,000 or more." (Michael Georgeu).
Taking into account that the size and complexity of the website are for the most part moderate,
except for integrating online donation and merchandise purchasing functionality, which typically
involves additional processes compared to a standard informational website, sticking to a
$35,000 budget was crucial since it is a non-profit organization. This amount of money ensures
the website effectively serves the foundation's goals and engages its target audience. A lot of
the pricing that we set for the budget took into account how reasonable it would be for a
nonprofit organization to afford the services. As mentioned, it also took into account the size of
the project and its features. For example, for design asset creation within the design phase, we
took into account how there wouldn’t be a large design necessity for the site and maximized the
cost. The same goes for the content creation phase, photography, and videography, which has
a set price of $600. Throughout the budgeting, we continued to look at areas that would be fair
to our services and also affordable. In regards to the actual budget, our team used different
units for different types of services- depending on the time restrictions and length each task
would take. For instance, we concluded that the design of our website could be pinpointed to a
specific number of hours and consultations, while the lengthier parts of the project, such as the
development would take months and require monthly payments since it is such a timeconsuming process. On that same note, some tasks such as the legal agreements and server
setup would only require 1-time payments, so we marked them as project-based. Overall, our
team was able to keep the cost of the project below $35,000, which was our goal for this
nonprofit’s website, and allowed it to be cost-effective yet fair for each department.
2. Client’s Feedback
Clients’ names:
Joseph Sardina
Gala Richards
Based on the client's feedback, the project budget for the majority of the prices and timeframe
was well thought out. We made some adjustments to what they provided to us, such as the
price for the domain registration. We knew it was a lifetime fee, but for the purpose of the
example, we had it for just three months. We extended it to one year since a lot of domain
registration payments are yearly. Clients also wondered how we ended up selecting two tests
for the functional testing. We thought of one test in the middle of the three months and another
test two weeks before the website was completely done- setting it up in that way is not as
precise as knowing exactly how many days the testing is going to take. Therefore, after doing
research, we found out that functional testing for the size and complexity of this website can
take about a week, so we set it up for four days. Our clients were concerned about our
developers having too much time, and needing a deadline that was further away from the
projects deadline. This would allow for more functional testing and accessibility testing. Our
team also re-evaluated the need for site migration and decided it was not needed as this would
be our client’s first website and first domain registration. The clients also inquired about the SEO
of the website since it requires a monthly fee for “however long the website is up”, but our team
only lasted 2 weeks. This was done in concern to the initial SEO costs, which include keyword
research, initial assessments, and on-page optimization. The budget does not account for the
monthly costs the company will have to pay for the duration of the site’s life, which could be
$500 per month. The clients will buy the public website we build for them.
Citations
https://imaginovation.net/blog/website-development-cost-complete-guide/