Creative Cost Cutting For Businesses Needing Website Design - Development During the Credit Crunch

For the creative industry, the credit crunch has created opportunities, as much as it has reduced potential income. With two successive quarters of economic contraction, businesses need to make savings and a reduction in marketing spend is often a soft target. For many organisations, the pressures that marketing & design agencies are facing is creating the opportunity to have marketing products and campaigns implemented more cost-effectively.

Freelancers and contractors need to be more flexible with the rates they charge, as they compete for fewer projects. This allows smaller agencies using freelancers as a design resource are able to react with better prices for their clients. Larger agencies, on the other hand, find reducing fixed costs more difficult because of financial demands of larger offices, higher energy bills and less flexible employment commitments, something reflected in prices. Over the past 6 months, 70% of smaller agencies with teams of 4 or less reported an increase in their business activities, as new clients switch away from more expensive, larger agencies.

In addition to lower prices, the ability to adapt service offerings is a key business advantage for smaller agencies during the credit crunch. For example, the 'website refresh' is an alternative to the more traditional website redesign. Whilst this has always been available, 'branding' the service makes it easier for potential clients to understand its value in the context of the current market conditions.

A typical 'website refresh' involves the graphical components of a website being creatively refined and converted into Flash files. These animations can be linked to editable text files, enabling the client to update content themselves and refresh the feel of the existing website with lower administrative overhead, cost and time requirements on an on-going basis.

Given the cyclical nature of business activity, organisations looking to the future should prepare for the next upturn by positioning themselves ahead of the market. Once demand returns, the availability of high quality creative design and marketing services will be impacted and become more expensive. Taking advantage of the current state of the economy is an opportunity, when seen in the right light.