Make sure you can edit your own site.

Even though your time is valuable, you probably don’t pay yourself hourly. You will, however, pay a designer hourly to make changes and updates to your website. Be sure you are only contacting them for large projects and additional design work, not changing your weekend hours or prices. Integrating with blog software like WordPress or Movable Type or a Content Management Solution (CMS) is a great way to maintain your site.

Choose an all-in-one solution.

Recently I have seen website solutions like GoodBarry that offer storefront software, hosting, and email marketing in bundles starting at $40 a month. Not only will this save you from paying multiple bills, which undoubtedly end up costing more once they are added together, but you can have all your tracking in one place. You can see if someone opened an email from you and then visited your store and made a purchase. This saves so much time and money. It also makes it incredibly easy to see if email marketing efforts are paying off.

Use royalty-free images.

These are images free to the public to use. You won’t get in trouble for using royalty-free images without the photographer’s permission. Not all the free images are great, however. You can often find great images for only $1 – $3 on websites like istockphoto. Your designer can suggest images, and you can decide if you would like to purchase them.

Choose a low-maintenance style.

There are certain looks people really like that end up being really expensive. For example, maybe you really want rounded corners on all the photos on your website, or you want all your images to look like drawings. Each image has to be edited to look like this. In the long run, these things could end up costing you lots of money.