Website Tradeoffs:
Staff Time, Money, Scope and Polish

When you're planning a website, you need to find the right mix of three important things: the staff time you spend on it, the money it costs, and the scope of your final site. And then there’s a four element— polish— that needs to be considered as well. Let's take a closer look at how you can balance these four things to make your project a success.

Staff Time

About many staff hours are available to spend on the development of the project— to define how it should work, write content, even build the site? How many of those hours are from staff who have the right skills? It’s not trivial to learn how to, for instance, build a site with WordPress or create a compelling graphic design. Unless you have a staff member who has both a lot of interest and aptitude, it’s unlikely to make sense to try to learn specific website skills for one project.  

Budget

Apart from the staff time spent, how much will everything cost? It’s likely that there are aspects of a graphic website that you can’t do in house— like graphic design, or the development of custom features—which need to be budgeted. You can also substitute money for staff time, to some extent. You may well have staff who could write all the content for the staff, but you might choose to hire a writer to ensure your staff can focus on the core aspects of their job. 

Scope

The traditional third part of this balance is the scope of the project. How big is the website? How many custom features does it have? How extensive is the process used to manage the build?  

The Traditional “Golden Triangle”

In the project management world, these three factors (or related ones) are often represented as a “golden triangle”. On almost every project, you’ll need to balance between them by making choices.

Sometimes, you might decide to use more staff time in order to bring down the budget. You might hire contractors in a busy time for your staff. Or instead of either, you could reduce the complexity of your website. For instance, a technical team will sometimes talk about a Minimum Viable Product, or MVP. This term describes the smallest possible feature set that will allow you to meet your most critical goals.

The Danger of Decreasing Polish

There’s one more factor to consider, although it’s dangerous. In addition to cutting down the complexity of your website to save time and cost, you could also cut down on polish. For instance, you could invest less in graphic design, professional copywriting, and thinking through the experience of the visitor on every page. Your site will look more like a prototype or an experiment than a final public site.

This might make sense in unusual cases - for instance, if you’re launching a complex application to a fairly internal audience, who understands the limitations of your initial unpolished launch. However, it’s critical to ensure that decreasing polish is a purposeful choice and not simply the result of under prioritizing graphic design or running out of money.

Launching a less polished site risks the credibility of both the website and your organization. Usability and, especially, graphic design is connected in visitors’ minds and they may take your important information or mission less seriously if you don’t invest enough in these areas. Once your visitors have formed an opinion of you, it’s much harder to change it.

Like all the other aspects, there’s a tradeoff between scope and polish (and money, and time). Reducing the scope or increasing the budget allows for more polish. If you take a MVP approach, you shouldn’t reduce the polish of the site, unless you decide that credibility to an external audience is not an important goal of the site. 

Defining the Tradeoffs

The most important thing is to find the right balance for you. What’s available in terms of staff time and budget? What level of scope and polish is important? Unless you have a lot of free staff time, a large budget, and a fairly small scope, you will have to make tradeoffs. Think through the tradeoffs that  make sense for your own organization’s goals.