An effective website is invaluable for any small business today. However, many make the mistake of only designing for their needs in the present, failing to consider how their business may outgrow the website's capabilities down the road.
With careful planning though, you can work with a cheap web designer to build a site that seamlessly scales alongside your evolving business needs and goals. Follow these tips:
Choose a Future-Proof Foundation
Opt for a sturdy, flexible underlying CMS framework like WordPress that makes adding and expanding functionality straightforward over time. Avoid restrictive niche site builders or outdated systems. The right foundation is critical.
Define Clear User Roles
Many businesses underestimate the need for access management during initial website builds. But defining clear roles like admin, editor, analyst, customer, etc. makes controlling access easy as your team expands. Build in role permissions from the start.
Favor Modular Over Monolithic
Resist the urge to build a complex, convoluted website. Instead, cheap web designers recommend constructing pages and sections in a modular way so they can be broken out separately in the future if needed. Modularity provides flexibility.
Document Architecture Thoroughly
With a complex site, it’s easy to lose track of how everything is structured behind the scenes. Maintain detailed documentation of site architecture that explains templates, naming conventions, code snippets, plugins, and more. This facilitates later changes.
Future-Proof Navigation
Build navigation menus in a way that allows easily adding and removing items over time. Use a responsive menu plugin that lets you tweak menu structures without breaking designs. Don’t hardcode navigation elements.
Set Realistic Performance Budgets
Account for expected traffic growth when defining performance goals like page speed. Avoid painting your cheap web designer into a corner by setting unrealistic benchmarks that will be difficult to maintain at scale. Build in the room to grow.
Automate Where Possible
Tools like CRMs, email marketing systems, and CMS workflows allow the automation of tasks that were once manual. Identify website bottlenecks and integrate compatible automation tools upfront to streamline operations at scale.
Plan for Multiple Contributor Tiers
Centralized content creation poses bottlenecks as you grow. Create tiers like internal authors, external contributors, syndicated partners, and more to make sharing the content workload easier down the line.
The key is designing websites from the start for scalability in all aspects - page structure, performance, integrations, and contributor capabilities. Building in that wiggle room allows a cheap web designer to cost-effectively evolve and expand your website in lockstep with your flourishing business over time.
