Is there anything I can do to decrease the cost and turnaround time for my website?

As a matter of fact, there are a few things that can cut down on turnaround time and cost.

Having a clear idea of what you want to get out of your website and what kind of content you want to appear on your site before attempting to start the design process can make a big difference. When someone comes to me and says, "I want a website," but has put no thought into what he/she wants out of the site, it makes design process extremely difficult.

One of the biggest hold-ups that I see in terms of turnaround time for non-CMS sites (sites in which the client does not directly update the site) is a lack of client-provided content for a website. I can put together a user-friendly and visually appealing site, be ready to go, but without the content from the client, the website is pretty much worthless.

Another big time-consumer for me is editing and enhancing client provided photos for a website. It typically takes far less time to take a good picture, than it does to attempt to make a poorly shot photo look presentable for a website. Obviously, there are exceptions to this. If you happen to snap a blurry photo of Bigfoot and really want to put it up on your site, then I'd be happy to spend the time making the photo presentable. However, if you send me blurry, underexposed product photos. It's probably not in your best interest, from an economic standpoint, for me to spend a couple of hours trying to clean up the photos, when they could just be retaken.

Along the same lines, another thing that I encounter frequently involves client supplied images that are intended to placed into an area with fixed dimensions (for example, a header banner image, or an image slide show), but the images do not conform to a similar aspect ratio of the areas where they are intended to be place . If a space that is intended for a landscape image (one that is wider than it is tall) and I am supplied with a portrait image (one that is taller than it is wide), I'm likely going to have to recreate the background of the photo in order to fit it into the available space, which can be very time consuming.