So your website is looking a bit out of date is it? Perhaps it doesn’t look good on mobile devices or perhaps the color pallet and buttons look a little dated. Maybe you have reached out to a few agencies and received some bids. They were probably a lot more expensive than you were expecting.

As an agency we have a lot we can do in terms of strategy with your website, but I digress. You have decided you are not ready to jump in and fully re-design your site at this time, but you would like to put some lipstick on the pig. This is the first part of a multi-part series on suggestions to update a website on a budget.

I suggest you buy a new website theme. That’s right, purchase one. There are plenty of free themes out there, (and if you find one you like then happy day!), but if you want to leverage the work of great designers for a fraction of the cost, then you’ll probably find what you’re looking for by purchasing one.

A really cool market has emerged in web design over the years. Web designers have found that they can make a lot of money designing a great site layout (more than they would make selling to just 1 client) and then selling it to thousands of people for a small cost. Expect the $10-$75 range. The designers win because they get to make great stuff and get paid well for it, and you win because you get a professionally designed web site layout. Of course it doesn’t fit your exact needs, but you can usually find something that is really close.

My favorite site to get themes from is http://themeforest.net. At the time of this writing theme forest has over 21,900 themes. They likely have a whole category for themes that will work with you existing CMS or E-Commerce site like

• Wordpress
• Drupal
• Joomla
• Moodle
• Shopify
• Ubercart
• Zen Cart
• Magento to name a few. Go take a look! There is of course a marketplace for most of these products as well so go look at those sites respectively. For example, https://wordpress.org/themes/ has themes, both free and paid. https://www.drupal.org/project/project_theme also has a variety of themes. At the end of the day, if you do not find what you are looking for on these sites, just google: “website template for <enter system name here>”

Of course you will likely have to make some content changes to fit your new, beautiful theme, but a little elbow grease is just the thing when working on a budget.