We’ve looked previously at what it costs to build a website for your business. The problem we find is that very few people realise the cost of a website, and many have not included this large expense in their budget. Many clients come to us expecting to pay between R2000 and R5000 for a website, including all the bells and whistles. This is just not possible to do while maintaining the minimum quality we require in all our websites.

There are, unfortunately, a painfully large number of companies and individuals around who will offer you a full bells-and-whistles site for between R2000 and R5000. What you actually get for this, however, is invariably far less than you expected and there are often hidden costs for maintenance and changes.

Having said this, we at Black Square have put our heads together to come up with a more affordable alternative to custom built sites for those customers who have a limited budget. The solution we’ve come up with is website packs. Over time, and as demand dictates, we will be putting together website packs which will be sold for between R5000 and R10000 each. Each pack will focus on a small, niche small business market, and will be structured to strict pre-defined specifications.

The idea came about because we realised that several customers in a particular industry or sector would require websites with very similar goals and structures. It occurred to us that, were we to research and plan for these needs in advance, we could offer pre-researched websites to customers, and the whole affordable pack idea evolved from there.

So, how can we offer a complete website at this price? Let’s take a look at the five steps again, and see how each is handled in the packs

Business Analysis

We do one business analysis for the niche industry when we build the pack. This research, and the resulting goals, are then defined for all users of the pack, and the cost of the research is shared across all the customers who use the pack.

Information Architecture

As with the business analysis, we work out in advance what types of information the site will most likely contain, and provide an information structure, and management tools, to handle that. If we do our job correctly, this should cover about 70% of all small businesses in the industry. Any business that requires more than the pack offers will need to go for a custom built website.

Design

Each website will still need a custom design, but the layout and information presentation will be pre-defined by the information architecture. The actual design work will be placing a custom skin onto the existing frame, which will reduce the design time considerably.

Code

The code for the pack is all pre-built, so each pack simply uses existing code. We do not do any code modifications or enhancements for the packs. The only coding we do is applying the design to the site, which often requires HTML layout work.

Note: code modifications are always possible, but we will charge an hourly rate to perform them.

Content Creation

We do not create actual content for the site at all – we leave that entirely to the customer. This includes both the initial content, and the ongoing process of growing the site. We provide the customer with a skeleton page structure and manuals on how to add and manage their content, but it is the responsibility of the client to create and maintain the content on their site. This is a critical step to keeping costs low.

Note: again, we do offer content creation as an additional service, should the client require it.

To date, we have a small range of packs available, but as time goes on, we will add more to this list. If you would like to see a pack for your industry, please let us know, and we’ll do the research.

Generic Pack:

This pack is a mix-and-match pack, designed to be used by our sales staff to produce the more specific packs. It is the catchall pack, for users who wish an affordable site, but find none of the more specific packs suitable. Standard content blocks and a range of additional content blocks, including feature blocks and image galleries, are available.

Guesthouse/Bed-n-Breakfast/Guest Lodge Pack:

This pack includes general content, with image galleries, rates tables, embedded Google map and a booking form. We found that many of the websites we researched had out-of-date rates tables or no rates displayed, so we developed an easy-to-use rates table content block that gives our customers much better control over how their rates are displayed.

Photographers Pack:

This pack is designed to showcase photographs, and contains several types of image gallery as well as the standard content blocks and a contact form.

Artists Pack:

This pack is similar to the photographers pack, but displays the galleries in a different manner, allowing images from an exhibition to be viewed as a group. It also allows for uploading of audio and video files for multimedia artists.