Web master challenges: Creating realistic budgets

By Ryan Boudreaux July 29, 2011 TechRepublic, Web Design

Unless you have the benefit and luck of unlimited resources for your web development projects, as a webmaster your responsibilities typically will incorporate budget management. Performing the budget dance every year can be quite a task for the web master, especially with the balancing act between web development dollars and ever increasing requirements. Budgets typically will consist of all the cost groups associated with your department or projects; in addition, if your projects are also a source of revenue, then sales budgets and income projections will be a part of the financial puzzle.

Overall it seems many IT budgets are expected to grow in 2011 and 2012, but typically, they are still very tight and characteristically are just templates of previous year’s numbers. One of the special challenges in maintaining status quo budgets is applying new technology to last year’s budget numbers. Especially when web masters are given new projects such as implementing cloud computing and mobile technology. These projects may not have been factored into the original budget. (Read more…)