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When you start a project, no matter how much control you have on all the aspects of your project, the budget is the part where you would trip over. Especially when it comes to a web application development project, many factors contribute to this inconsistency, which we would discuss later.
One of the main factors is the technology, and the other is the time taken by projects nowadays. You have a budget, and then you start planning on what platform you should build your website, and you also have no idea how long would the development takes place because, in the first place, you haven’t determined the technology.
Even if you have determined the technology you would be using for your project, you need to find the right team to deliver that product for you, “In your Budget.“
Because the web application development teams are of a wide range, but we would categorize them into three main categories.
- Freelancer
- Established company
- Small company
Well, each category has a different team size, and each of them has its pros and cons with which you could determine your budget only up to an extent.
So, creating a list of Ideas for your web app development budget is essential!
It’s not surprising that an Entrepreneur expands his business once they have decided to pick a point to give their business a new height. A plan with a perfect margin of the business analytics, which you expect from the market audience, must decide by the business user.
A development field is vast with various platforms like web app development, mobile app development, and desktop app development. Your business analytics measures the overview of web applications and mobile apps in various devices like Android, iOS, Tablet.
1. Plan before project development
For making a better move on the development platform, you will have to select a platform on which your web app would be developed.
Your final decision towards developing a web app is on some platform, say XYZ. It required a converse with the business executive to get more detail for the project development and services after completing the product.
The project estimation must decide by you whether it’s according to your conceived for web app development budget or not. The best match will give you a better outcome as well as satisfied with the same.
In the image below you can see the web application development process:
2. Shape your Vision
After you plan your project, you need to combine the split visuals into the direction to get the same picture-perfect view for your product.
There are many ways to select the product design, but what is your design for the product you’re going to order for development? You can ask the designer to develop a screen design for you; meanwhile, you need to know several sales department screenings.
How would you know the figures for your design screens?
The project budget depends on the project complexity and its developed timeline.
In simple words, the budget depends upon how big your project is and how long does it take to build. The complexity that comes when you sign the project length and the business analyst gives the timeline for the project completion.
The web development budget depends on how many web pages you want to develop. The number of web pages if you want a web application and number of screens if you want a mobile application for your business.
If the demand project’s budget reached a high cost and you think delay for developing it, you may have less chance to get into the e-commerce business field.
The solution for the web development company’s dilemma is that you can extend functionality or the unit that is not in use now and update it later on in the future.
By following the advice, your web and mobile app development budget will maintain, and using crosscutting may work for your product. Your investment for the project development will be worth it for you.
Remember the factors which we were talking about earlier?
Let’s get back to them; here are the factors which would keep your web app development project in budget.
Did you know that according to Pew Research, Voice search and voice engine optimization are two big design trends for web applications development?
3. Defining Project Scope While Documenting the Project Proposal
Due to multiple contact channels, clients are always asking the project proposals to the more than one software development company and do comparative shopping/bidding in one sense!
Software development teams are always focusing on the costing to give highly competitive project estimation to lure the indecisive clients into settling with the company fever.
However, established web development companies never produce false or unrealistic project estimation, be it ballpark or final estimation.
Instead, prestigious software building companies try to carefully define each project scope and avoid project creeps on the later stages or during the development process.
Thus, the project creeps’ section is an essential part of the project documentation and given enough weight before finalizing the project.
Technically, project creeps define the expected features and functions involved in the software in question and prevent clients from demanding beyond it anything free or under the project cost.
If clients demand additional features and functionalities, the software development companies can ask for additional charges and extensions.
4. Planning Features and functionalities
Features and functionalities are something you need to take care of when you want your project to stay in the budget because it’s the features and functionalities which take much time for development.
Suppose you do not make a comprehensive list of things. In that case, you need to prepare yourself for spending way over your budget because the corrections or addition of things to your web app is not an easy task; it requires a lot of programming and coding, which means much time, and more time means more money.
To avoid this, you need to have your features and functionalities figured out way before building an app. Furthermore, using project management AI tools can help to cut down on time spent on documentation and other parts of managing the project so that resources are freed up in order to provide consultancy or direction to parts of the team, this may speed up the development process and reduce overall costs.
Pruning of the software product’s features and functions, directly and indirectly, reduce the burden on the budget and end up with expected quality by cutting off the cost of software development.
In the image you can see the technical features of Web Application Development
5. MVP Outcome
The project, which is of vast scale software designing and programming projects, investing in all planned features and categories, sees non-practical on various facets.
Therefore, if you have the right software consultancy by your developers or software consultants, they might have advised you to create a Minimum Viable Product first to test in the real market environment and gradually add the only necessary features and functionalities, which will only
make your web app grow to sustain its competition.
6. Choosing technology according to your project and budget size
You might want to go crazy with your new web app; you know what’s in and what’s not trending in the market right now. But you have budget constraints, and your project doesn’t need all that bling.
What should you do?
You need to choose the latest technology; yes, it’s true! But it does not mean that you go way ahead of what’s needed. That’s an overkill!
That’s like riding a superbike for your daily commute, where you cannot utilize the power it has to provide. So, what do you do in this case? You ride a more economical commuting vehicle.
The same thing with web app development, you don’t need a top web app development technology always!
You could choose something which best suits your project for the short term if you have budget constraints. You can always upgrade then to the latest technology.
For example, if you have chosen to build your web app in WordPress, but because of your budget constraints, you cannot go for the one with the premium features, what you can do is go for the simplest one to begin. Later you could go for the most premium features as your business grows.
7. Apply rapid Development Technologies and MVC like Frameworks to Cut the Timeline of the Projects
Choosing the technology stack for your web app development wisely may help you to cut the budget or respect the budgetary constraints right from the beginning.
Many development technologies yield a fast turnaround of the project thanks to short, clean, and comprehensive code.
MVC like frameworks provides opportunities to the designers and programmers to work on the same project parts simultaneously due to the separation of the model and view parts of the project.
MVC like frameworks cut the timeline significantly and offer opportunities to work in collaborative ways to improve the quality of software products and manage the software development costs.
8. Using the latest Project Management Software, Tools, and Trained Team to Respect the Deadline and Utilize Optimal Resources.
Completing the project within the given timeline and software development budget is always the prime objective of any software development project.
Therefore, a trained team, team leader, and project managers are essential requirements for cost efficiencies.
If you strictly monitor the project process, it leaves profound impacts on the success of the project.
Fortunately, we have out of the box project management software available in the market and may are cloud-based well all of them now, and they also support mobile devices so that you could gain access to your project from anywhere.
You can work with offshore clients from any time zone of the world and stay in contact with the developers from different territories and collaborate your work on time. The modern Project management systems allow all the stakeholders to take active participation to bring innovative ideas to the surface.
9. Using the latest Communication Channels or Technologies and Use Appropriate Versions of Tools or Platforms to support Efficient collaboration
There could be a 90+ percent chance that you would outsource your web app development project to a top web development company, which is about 1000 miles away from you.
So, communication is something critical when you are not in the same town. When a software development team works on a project, versioning is always an issue for multiple developers focusing on the same parts. Sub versioning software/frameworks like SVN are the best tools to mitigate the problems.
Similarly, various communication channels, including email, chats, instant messengers, and video conferences, are elegant ways to remove the communication barrier and enhance the collaboration among the team members and the client-side team to cut the software development costs.
Good collaboration always results in a quality product and, most importantly, cuts down your budget by easing the development process and making it productive and controlling software development costs.
10. Labor Charges
One of the central aspects where you could stay in budget is where you would outsource your app.
Typically for an ecommerce website, the price for building costs somewhere between $5000 to a lot more.
To keep your website in your budget, you could go for different service providers from different regions, yes you heard it right regions.
Labor charges differ according to the region and the size and brand of the service provider, so if you could choose smart and handle a project, you could have a great quality product in your hand.
The labor charges are drastically different, while web developers in North America charge about $70 – $250, which is the highest. South Asian countries like India or Hong Kong charge between $15 – $80, which is the least. There are other regions like the UK or western parts of Europe charging a little higher than North America, and Australia charges a bit reasonable behind them.
There isn’t anything like the quality is low when you pay less, nope! It always depends on you and the web development company. How good is your strategy to make this project work, how efficiently is the work progressing, how well are you communicating with your team is what determines your success.
11. The Team
When it comes to the team you’ve selected for your web application development, they are important reasons that could have a significant impact on your web application’s cost and quality.
Many companies will make the mistake of selecting their web developer based on the lowest hourly rate or even the cheapest bid; what you need to do is known about the team.
Things such as; how long the team has been together. If they have pulled out any project before, how much they know about the technology they are working on, or if they have done any project on the platform they are currently working on.
All these factors will give you a clear idea if you could go ahead with this project.
Also, make sure that you are choosing a team that is well rounded and can provide both web design and web application development.
A good team of designers/developers can make design and development decisions on the fly, resulting in a product that looks good and amazing in functionality while reducing communication and project management headaches and costs.
12. Update and review allocations regularly.
Yep! Review, review, and review again. Not even the most meticulous software project manager will accurately forecast hours and keep track of throughout a project without a regular review of budget and resource allocations.
For example, one of the employees or a team member worked an extra 10 hours last week to finish a task. There you go, your budget for the month is disrupted, and you would never know unless you reviewed it regularly.
Without a regular review of schedule, scope, and budget, you’ll lose track quickly; you might not be able to find small off tracks that might not seem to be big or even come to notice but affect you by the end of the project.
If you notice your project is regularly going over-schedule, it might be time to chat with your client and or project stakeholders about increasing the budget.
Conclusion
So there you go, to stick to your budget, you need to take care of all the aspects or factors I have mentioned and make sure you never go off track, not even a minor bit, and reviewing is the best thing you could do, and if you are regular with reviewing, you will be in your budget.
All these factors you need to take care of following might look daunting, but when you start with good homework of your project and come up with a technology that best suits you and isn’t overkill for your project, you’re already saving a lot. But if you’re project is demanding for an expensive technology; you could always save by using your management skills. Don’t forget to share this article.
Mohit Maheshwari is Chief Strategist at NMG Technologies, a full service IT Company offering advanced and full-fledged web app development and designing services. He has been in the industry since 2000 and focuses on long-term strategies, intuitive user experience and successful customer acquisition.