What is the cost of creating a website in South Africa?

Website design prices in South Africa varies from R500 – R30 000 for the exact same website depending on the skill and experience a designer has, and programming language/s or content management systems (CMS) they use.

When you’re thinking of getting a website design done for yourself or your company, you will likely be looking for the best pricing from a quality website design company.  Sure, you could pay a few bucks to a freelancer who will likely mess some things up, or you could actually invest some money into your new website and have everything go smoothly and look amazing when it’s finished.  Think of it this way, would you hire a person walking past your house to fix a broken window or would you call a company that specializes in it?  Right, you would call the company who has done this plenty of times instead of hiring someone off of the street.

Figuring out an exact quote is the same as asking someone how long a piece of string is.  You can’t figure it out with just a simple question of “How much does it cost to design a website?” when there are many variables included in the quote.  Don’t worry about asking for a quote, over 80% of jobs that come across a web designer’s desk have to go over quotes and explain how everything will work since most of the clients are doing this for the first time.  But, to get an exact quote, you will need to go over a few things that I’ve listed below.

Have an idea of what you want

It wouldn’t surprise you how often a client comes across our desk asking for a website design, but they aren’t exactly sure what they want.  They know they want a design done, but they aren’t sure how they want anything to look or work, which makes the process of getting a quote much longer.  It’s ok if you don’t know what exactly you want on your website, just knowing what you want and giving an example of it on a competitor or random website will go a long way when we’re trying to figure everything out for you.

3 Questions to answer so you can figure out what you want

1. What’s the basic purpose of your website?

Knowing the basic purpose of your website should be what drove you to want a website in the first place.  You might want a website designed to sell a service or you might need something designed to sell a product.  You could even need a website to just post content to, which would basically be a blog.

Figuring out the purpose of your website will cut out a lot of what we don’t need to do, so this will help us out a lot when generating a quote.

2. What type of functionality do you need out of the website?

You’ll need to figure out if you would like to have a responsive or static website design and what you want your visitors to do on your website in order to know the functionality.  Knowing the functionality of the website will help us a lot because we won’t be programming something that won’t be used, or even needed, which will help with your quote as well.

Will you need any of these? 

• Service pages
• Product pages
• Online payments
• A Registration and login page
• A Blog on your website
• Newsletter signup
• Social media integration
• Search engine optimization services
• Online marketing services
• Responsive web design
• etc.

Knowing what you need, or want, on your website goes a long way when it comes to an accurate quote.  If you were to just give us 10 different websites as examples, and say “I like these websites and I would like my own to be similar” it would cost much more than taking a little bit of time writing down what functionality you’d like on your own website.  It would be a higher quote because we would have to assume you wanted everything, from every website you gave as an example, on your own website.  This means you will have a lot of features you weren’t even thinking about, on your own website, and you may not have wanted them.

3. Roughly how many pages do you think you’ll need to be designed?

Every web design company can give you a rough estimate of a price based on how many pages you need to be done.  If the quote is simply based on how many pages you need to be done, it won’t be very accurate.  In fact, it will likely be much higher than what you expected since the variables from #1 and #2 weren’t figured out.

This is why we ask people about the purpose and functionality of their new website designs before we ask how many pages they think they’ll need to be done.

Think of it this way, you will need pages such as your home/index, about us, products, contact us, privacy policy, terms of service, blog, etc.  Each of these is considered 1 page and each blog post would not be added to the total unless you need someone to write up content for you in order to add it to your blog.  A lot of websites work well with under 10 pages, but if you aren’t sure how many pages you need, your quote won’t be spot on since there is a variable missing.  Don’t get worried, not knowing how many pages you need is a common problem that we deal with all the time and it’s not the end of the world.

Know your design and programming budget

If you know how much you’re wanting to spend, don’t be scared to tell a designer when they ask what your budget is.  They’re not trying to get the most money out of you as they can, they’re just trying to figure out a plan that will work best within your budget.

For example, if you had R10,000 to spend on a design and wanted something just like Facebook, it probably wouldn’t be the easiest thing to do since there is a mountain of programming that would need to be done.  Since the designer knows your budget and has an idea of what you want, they can put together a package that will work for you, but it might not have everything included since you want a clone of Facebook and that would cost much more than R10,000.  They can, however, put together a design and get some custom scripting done for you that would get you on your way to having a unique social network, which would get you on your way to having a finished product down the road.

We regularly ask people what their budgets are because we, just like the example above, are trying to figure out exactly how we can get as much done for you within your budget so you’re as happy as possible.

Some extras that you might need

We all want a website designed for a reasonable price, and that’s exactly what we do!  But there are some additional add-ons that you might want to think about before you spend all your money on the design.  If your budget for everything is R3,000 and you spend all of that on your design, you will be upset when you can’t get the hosting you want or the fact you can’t spend any money on marketing to bring in traffic and sales.  This is why we always let people know about the additional charges, that are usually required if you want to start running a website.  These extras are:

1. Domains and Hosting

Every single website out there runs on a domain, which means you’ll need one as well.  You can purchase these through big domain registrars and most of the time you can purchase them when you set up a hosting plan for your website.  You’ll need to pay to renew your domain name each year and your hosting can be paid every month or on an annual basis, that’s up to you.

If you don’t know how to do any of this, that’s not a problem at all since we can walk you through the entire process.

2. Online Marketing

Most new website owners think “If you build a website, the traffic will come” and that’s far from the truth.  In order to get plenty of traffic to your website, you will need a proper marketing campaign up and running for at least a few months before you start to see a positive ROI.  There is a small chance that you could be profitable relatively quickly, but I wouldn’t expect it since it tends to be competitive when you’re a new website fighting your experienced and older competitors in order to obtain clients.

Online marketing comes in many forms, such as:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
• SMM (Social Media Marketing/Management)
• PPC Management (Pay Per Click Marketing/Management)

Each has it’s own strengths and takes a long time to learn, so we highly recommend working with a credible SEO company if you want to start doing any sort of online marketing.

3. Website Content

If you’re writing up all your own content, and even your own blog posts, this isn’t going to cut into your overall budget at all.  But, if you’re not the best writer and you need someone to write up your home/index, sales pages, product pages, blog posts, etc. it would be an additional charge because this takes a bit of time and effort in order to be done right.

If you want images within the content, they will likely have to be purchased from a stock image company in order to prevent a lawsuit from unlawfully using images you found online. Check out our list of Royalty Free Stock Images and Photographs for Your Website or Blog.

4. Website Maintenance

Not every website will need us to go in and maintain it since a lot of clients don’t update much after they go live.  Adding blog posts is easy to do and can be done by yourself, or you can hire us to do it if you really want. We charge a very low rate of R150 p/hour for website design and content updates, and we’ll always give you a quote before the updates are made so that you know exactly how much it will cost.

Checklist

Below is a quick checklist of what you will need to answer before you can get the most accurate quote possible.

• What is your reasonable deadline?
• Is your deadline a hard stop or can it be extended if needed?
• What is your budget for the website to be designed?
• How many pages will you need to be designed and what functions do they need to have within them?
• Do you need any animation done?  If so, what exactly is needed?
• Do you have your own domain and hosting set up already?
• Do you need online marketing for your website?
• Do you need content generation for your website?

You can use our easy-to-use web design quote builder to build a quote by selecting the features you need for your website, choose a website design package, or you can contact us to discuss your exact requirements.