Offering Clients Multiple Website Project Options

When you're thinking about upgrading your phone and you go to a product page such as the one for the iPhone, you're given plenty of options to choose from. By offering multiple options for the same product, customers can quickly go from thinking, "do I need an iPhone?", to "which iPhone should I get?".

The same rules apply to services and projects. By offering different project options, rather than clients thinking, "should I go ahead with this project?", they might think "what option should I go ahead with?".

For the same reason, clients will also be a lot less likely to compare your price to other developers and studios, and will instead only compare the different options you're offering.

But how many options should you offer? What can you offer for each option? And what should you charge for each option? Let's go through each of these points.

The initial project option

So let's say you're just drafted a proposal for a new potential client that outlines the scope of the work for a website redesign. You might decide the price based on a rough estimate of your hourly rate multiplied by how long you think it will take with a buffer on top.

If you're currently working using hourly based pricing, I'm going to explain when you should use hourly and when you should use project pricing in a separate post.

Let's say for example that the price comes out to $12,000 for the full redesign of a website, including a design stage in Figma, development in Webflow, and help with launch.

Rather than giving our client just the one option - for them to either do the project or not do the project - we can give our client 2 other options to choose from, a cheaper option and a premium option.

The cheaper option

Now you can think, if we offered a cheaper project option, what might that look like?

It's unrealistic to think we can just remove certain pages and the client won't mind, as they will still probably want the full scope of the website. Instead, we might reduce the design process, so rather than designing every page in Figma, we can just design 3 pages with a couple of rounds of revisions, and then base the rest of the website in once we do the Webflow development around those three pages.

You could also start from a Webflow template, and do your designs in Figma based around the template, so when you get into development you already have a system for your website in Webflow set up.

Either way, you're looking for ways that you can make the process faster so that it takes less hours for you, and can be a cheaper option with the client.

The premium option

On the other side of our options we can have our premium option, so think about what you might be able to offer on top to make things easier for the client in the long run.

For this you might offer detailed training of Webflow for your client, or you can offer a month of development support after launch in case they need to come back to you for anything else, or maybe you'll offer help with setting up integrations for things like the Facebook Pixel to track advertising.

Think about what added knowledge that you can provide that the client hasn't asked for but might be helpful for them.

What can you uniquely offer that they might not be able to find anywhere else?

Either way, you're looking for that secret sauce that you can add to your premium project option, to give added value at an additional cost.

2 premium options

The other way of outlining different project options is adding 2 premium options if you can't think of a way to break down or reduce the original scope.

If you want to go down this route, you can instead break your premium option into 2 options, so you have the initial project scope as the first option, a pro option, and then a premium option.

Think of this in the same way a product like Slack offers multiple different plans depending on the features that are included, that way a customer can pick the plan that is most suitable for them.

Avoiding scope creep

The other benefit to lay out several different project options, is that depending on what option they pick, you're making it clear what's not included in the scope, which means this is a great way to reduce scope creep.

If they pick your first cheaper project option, and then at the end of the project they ask for help to integrate advertising tracking, it's already outlined in the proposal that that wasn't included in the option they choose.

Pricing your project options

Now you can price the different project options however you want, but it's best to start by pricing out the initial full scope of work that the client is asking for, and then working around that.

For example, we're setting the full website redesign project to cost $12,000, so now we might add a cheaper option where we start with a template for $9,000, and then finally we add in the premium option where we provide full integration support for $15,000.

There is no perfect way to price your options, but just keep in mind the time that it's going to take to do extra work, or the time you will save when shortening the process, and make sure that the client is getting the same amount if not more value for that price.

Summary

To reiterate:

• Provide multiple project options to your clients so they are comparing the options rather than having to say simply yes or no
• Outline a cheaper option by reducing the design or development process, and a premium option by adding on what you can uniquely provide
• Or, add 2 premium options with extra benefits for each one
• Price your project options accordingly, making sure to factor in the time that it will take for you to do the extra work, and the amount of value the clients will get