Budgeting for maintenance

The cost of maintaining your website over a 12 month period needs to be estimated and the money allocated so that the website has every chance of achieving its goals.  

Many businesses make the mistake of only considering the cost of developing a new website and forget the cost of annual maintenance. For some businesses the maintenance costs are not high, for others they can far exceed the development cost. No matter what the cost, annual budgeting for maintenance is very important.  

The website budget should be considered along with everything else at budget time. It might be listed as a unique item in the overall budget and given its own allocation. Alternatively, "website maintenance" may not appear separately but the budget allocation might be spread across a number of budget lines - eg the cost of promoting it allocated to the Marketing Department and the hosting costs to the IT Department.  

A combination of both models might be appropriate.  

What to do

To estimate the maintenance budget, use a spreadsheet program (eg Microsoft's Excel) or use a word processor (eg Microsoft's Word) to do the following:  

Option 1: Download an example budget that you can use to help determine your own budgeting requirements. 

 e-businessguide Template Document - Estimated Annual Website Maintenance Costs (23 kb)
  

Option 2: Create a new document in a spreadsheet program and do the following:

1. In column one: identify and list the anticipated cost areas for your e-business over the twelve month period of the budget - include every task, whether it is done in-house or outsourced - eg webmaster, graphic design, responding to feedback on the website, writing new text, creating new online forms, promotion, database licence, hosting, evaluation.
2. In column two: estimate the quantity for each component - eg annual, 3 days, 8 hours.
3. In column three: calculate the cost of each component based on an average hourly rate or the fixed annual fee - eg for a database licence or e-commerce credit card system.
4. Calculate the total of column three, and then add about 5% for unforeseen circumstances to arrive at the annual budget.  

It may then be appropriate to separate the budget items and costs for tasks done in-house and those to be outsourced.