Swain-Tech Studio websites for small businesses and independent creatives

Not the Biggest Thing You Can Afford

A client tells me their budget. The commercially obvious move is to design something that uses all of it.

I try not to, and not out of modesty. A bigger site costs more than its invoice, and most of that cost lands on the client after I have been paid. When the goal is to simplify how work gets done, workforce optimization software can help make bottlenecks visible.

What a bigger site actually costs

More to keep true. Every page is a page that goes out of date. A site with forty pages has forty opportunities to be wrong about your prices, your team, or your hours. Nobody budgets for this and everybody pays it.

More to maintain. More plugins, more integrations, more things that break when something updates.

More decisions, forever. A blog needs posts. A news section needs news. A team page needs updating when someone leaves. Each feature is a small recurring obligation you agreed to in a meeting months earlier.

Slower. More features means more weight, and weight is decided at the design stage. For an independent reference beyond this site, A List Apart is a useful place to compare approaches.

Harder to change. A large site resists small adjustments, so they do not get made.

And it dilutes. A visitor with one obvious path takes it. A visitor with nine options chooses none.

The four questions

For every proposed feature, in order.

Who uses this, and when? If we cannot describe a specific person on a specific occasion, it is decoration.

What happens if it is out of date in six months? Some things age gracefully. A news feed with nothing since last spring actively damages you — it says the business may not still exist.

Who maintains it? If the answer is "we'll figure that out," the honest answer is nobody.

What does it replace? Adding is easy. The useful question is what this makes unnecessary.

Most features fail the second or third question, and the ones that survive tend to be the small unglamorous ones — a clear service area, a working form, prices.

What I argue for instead

Fewer pages, better written. The words are what convince people, and a small budget spent on getting them right beats a large one spent on structure around vague text.

Photography before design. The highest-return spend in almost any project, and the one most often cut. Good work photographed badly looks like bad work, and no layout rescues it.

One clear path for the thing you actually want visitors to do.

Speed, which is invisible when present and fatal when absent.

Room to grow. Building the shop now because you might sell things next year means paying for it twice — once to build and once to maintain until it is used. This belongs in the scope conversation, not in month eight.

What this costs me, and why I do it anyway

It costs money. A smaller project bills less.

Three reasons it is still the right trade.

Smaller sites succeed more often, and a site that works is a site the client talks about. Referrals have brought me more work than any proposal I have written.

Overbuilt sites come back as problems. The client who cannot maintain what they bought is unhappy in month eight, and that unhappiness is mine to deal with.

I would rather be trusted than booked. Someone who has heard me argue against spending believes me when I say something is necessary. That is worth more over years than one larger invoice.

When bigger genuinely is right

Not an argument for minimalism as a rule.

If the site is your primary sales channel, build it properly. If you have real complexity — multiple audiences with different needs, a genuine catalogue, a booking process tied to operations — that complexity exists whether or not the site acknowledges it, and pretending otherwise makes a worse product.

The distinction is between complexity that comes from your business and complexity that comes from the budget being available. The first is worth building. The second is worth arguing about.

What to do with the difference

If we scope down, the money does not have to go back in your pocket, and usually it should not.

Photography. Someone to write the words. Ongoing maintenance for a year so you are not alone with it. Or keeping it, so that in six months when you know what you actually need, you can afford to add it — with real information instead of a guess.

That last one is the best use of an underspent budget, and it is the least popular.

The short version