We have attempted to give you a good idea of our typical website design and development rates below. However, please realise that it is difficult to generalize when it comes to website prices. Each person's requirements are different and costs can therefore vary tremendously. We insist on doing a complete website analysis with you before we quote you any firm prices.

The "packages" listed are, however, good examples of 247highway's typical web design and development costs. Please note that eventhough the prices quoted are in South Africa Rands, we will quote you in your preferred currency. Thanks to the WWW global village, we have clients in countries around the world.

Our portfolio is full of satisfied clients. Feel free to contact any of them for a testimonial.

• The website prices listed below are a guideline for typical, basic websites which are written in HTML, XML and CSS, without any complex interactivity being required. We like to keep our websites flexible so if you have a special requirement, then give us a call and, after analysis, we will make a recommendation of what you require. Unlike other companies who just sell whatever fixed packages they have, we can tailor any website package to suit you and quote you according to the functionality needed.
• Interactivity is the automatic online processing of such things like user logins, shopping e-commerce and data capturing (apart from standard online enquiry forms) and the uploading of content like images and other information that needs to be processed or calculated. It is very difficult to say what an interactive website will cost without knowing the specific details - See our "interactive website" section below.
• Please also remember that the cost of a web site is not proportionate to the number of pages required. A single page web site still requires infrastructure layout, graphic manipulation and web coding. Developing the basic "look and feel layout" and the graphics for a single page website can take as long as it does for a 100 page website.
• Note that all our websites (irrespective if the website is 1 page or 100+ pages) are ALWAYS designed in a search engine friendly manner, using appropriate expert coding methods and adhering to all search engine "rules and regulations". In this way it is easy for us to perform Search Engine Optimization for you.

Single Page "Who we Are" Type Website

Most businesses now recognise that they need a web address and at least a basic website. But some businesses are not ready for a full website or they have no real content to place there yet. In this situation we can create a "temporary" single page website, with some basic information about what you do and your full contact details, including 1 email link. Be warned that this type of website gets the least effective exposure on the web. A Single Page website is priced from R750.00.

Rent a Website - Special 2010 Limited Offer

This is the ideal starting point for all those business owners who want to enter the online world and check out how a website will benefit them before taking the full plunge. Use our Rent a Website package to get a fully functional, professionally designed site, complete with free maintenance updates and support at an affordable price. Have a look here at what this Rent a Website offers.

Online Brochure Format (4-5 pages) - no interactivity involved

This is a basic website with four or five pages such as a home page, about us, products or services page, contact details, and basic enquiry form. You provide the required content and there is no complex interactivity involved. You supply us with your text, images and logo and we design a suitable layout for you. You receive 2 email addresses.

A Four or Five Page website price will cost about R3,000 - R5,750. This affordable price includes Web Domain Name Registration Fees ( for 1 year) and Free Hosting Setup. If you require basic search engine optimisation (SEO) please add about R750-R1,750 - this depends on the SEM package you choose. See our "SEO and SEM" section to find out why SEO is vital for your website.

Small or Medium Business Website - 10 pages - no interactivity involved

This is a website with four or five basic pages such as a home page, about us, products or services page, contact details, and basic enquiry form plus additional pages illustrating more products and services and perhaps including a portfolio or testimonial details. 2 email addresses are provided. Basic SEO (Keyword Research and Search Engine Optimisation) will be included.

Priced from R4,500 to R7,500. This excellent price includes Web Domain Name Registration Fees (1 year) and Free Hosting Setup.

Small or Medium Business with Basic Ecommerce - 10 pages with payment processing

Maybe you need a Small or Medium Business Website AND you also need to sell a single item or very small number of items (maximum 5) online using Paypal or a similar payment processing service? Or maybe you need to take variable payments online for services you provide?

This type of website with some ecommerce functionality costs in the region of R4,500 to R7,500 including Web Domain Name Registration Fees (1 year) and Free Hosting Setup. Basic SEO (Keyword Research and Search Engine Optimisation) is also included.

Content Managed System (CMS) - Self-managed Website

If required we can make your website user-updateable with a customized and branded website content management system (CMS). We setup the basic infrastructure and page layouts and you can then change your website content as often as you like, if necessary.

Please note that Content management systems (CMS) are not without their quirks. You do need reasonably solid computing skills for preparing images for the web and formatting of text layout. Sometimes users have problems using the CMS and have to ask us to sort things out for them. This, of course, means that it can get quite costly in the long run. Ask us about a cheaper alternative to a full CMS.

A CMS website, depending on your requirements, costs in the region of R7,500 to R12,000 including Web domain Name Registration Fees (1 year) and Free Hosting Setup. Basic SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is also included.

Full Ecommerce Website with Content Management Administration and payment processing

We can design, develop and set up a professional full Ecommerce website with a shopping cart to take online credit card payments via your merchant account or even PayPal or some other payment processing service. This can include a user-friendly administration area that will allow you to input your own stock, images and change prices, etc. The administration area is accessible online via a secure User Login and password.

Shopping Cart and Ecommerce web prices range from R9,000 to about R14,000. Our standard solution is about R10,750. This would normally include basic search engine optimisation, web domain name registration (1 year) and free hosting setup.

Interactive Websites: Real Estate Agencies, Subscription Websites, Forums, Membership Sites, etc.

These are all unique and complex systems that would be custom-designed to suite your needs. It is difficult to put an estimated price on websites like these since complex features are often requested that can make the cost of one site substantially more than another. They also require databasing functionality and adequate web hosting storage and traffic bandwidth allocation and implementation. All we can say is that most of them would probably be in the range of R8,000 to R18,000. We will do a free in-depth analysis of your requirements and quote accordingly.

Add-on functionality and services that 247highway offers

Website Updates and Modification Rates

Your customers will know whether you are keeping the information on your web site up-to-date or not. A staff member just has to say "the info on the web site is out of date, that's no longer right" - and you lose so much credibility as a professional business. In addition, if there are no interesting changes of content they will stop coming back to visit your site. It is vital that you update and add to the content of your website on a regular basis. This also helps with your Search Engine ranking.

Lots of our clients don't want the hassle of website content management or any other "technical geek" stuff and if you are one of those we can do the changes to your site on an ad hoc basis. We don't believe in holding you to ransom for these changes and our charge is only R275.00 per hour or part thereof. (This does not apply to our "Rent a Website" special package).

This fee should cover most text and minor image changes that you require to a few pages. If the changes are very small we may not even charge you for this or we will just add them to your next invoice. If you need more extensive page additions and image changes we will quote you on an ad hoc basis for these.

Article Blog

If you have a need to add news, articles and other information on a regular basis, we can "attach" an article blog to your website. This means that you can "self-manage" this part of your website yourself. It has great advantages in that search engines just love it when a website is constantly updated and "growing" with more and more text pages - they will index your site on a regular basis. This also means that they will start to see your website as more and more "important" and give you better search listings and ranking. We customise your blog to look exactly like the other pages of your website. A blog has a "sign up" page for your users or customers, so that you can email to all the people on this list whenever you have made any additions to the blog - this is a great marketing tactic. Add approximately R2,500 to the price of any of the website packages.

Depending on your type of business, we can provide a fully-customized "standalone" blog website for you (without one of our website packages). The cost of this will be in the region of R3,000-R4,800.

Newsletters and Customer Email Lists

Some of our clients often want to send out regular newsletters or promotional material to their customers. This is easy to do when you only have a list of 50 or so customers, but gets quite cumbersome over that number. Some mail hosts (ISP's) also limit the sending of large numbers of emails per hour. We can set up a database and client registration section on your website. When you mail us the newsletter text and images, we design and layout your newsletter, etc. and send out the emails on your behalf, irrespective of the number of clients on your list. A typical A4 newsletter or promotional page would cost in the region of R850.00 per mailing.

Email Branding

An excellent marketing tactic is to "brand" every email that you send to a customer. This means designing stunning, informative graphic banners or signature files for inclusion into your email software (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc.). Contact us for more information and costs.

Social Media - Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo, Hubpages, etc.

Social interactivity on the internet is now all the rage. We can design the necessary graphics and pages to "brand" yourself on most of the social media networking sites. Ask us for more information.

Afrikaans to English translation / Website Copywriting

It is a fact of life that a very large percentage of all websites in South Africa are in English as this reaches the widest client base (local / international). Many of our clients express themselves fluently in Afrikaans and just don't have the time to translate their text into English for the website. We offer a translation service at a cost of R75.00 per A4 page. (Note: this service is free for "Rent a Website" clients.) We also offer basic web copywriting at R225.00 per A4 page i.e. writing your pages from scratch.

Things that affect Web Design Prices and Fees

Here are a few things that will affect the price of your website:

• Copy typing: Having to transcribe large blocks of text from paper documents takes time. You should always try to provide us with your text copy in digital format. The actual format is not particularly important as long as it is saved in a file. Even basic emailed text is fine. Any formatting would have to be changed or discarded when coding the website anyway.
• Graphic design and photo manipulation work: This is definitely the single most time-consuming part of developing any website. If your site requires lots of original graphic design work and photos, expect to have to pay a little extra for this.
• Changing your mind halfway: When we design and develop your website or part of your website as agreed with you per your quotation, and you suddenly decide to change parts of the website and your requirements, the work that has already been done will still have to be paid for. This makes it very important that you think carefully about what you want on your website before we start work on your site.
  
  We supply you with guidelines and a full web analysis form before we even quote you. In this way you can be sure to plan your website correctly from the start and that you have made definite decisions about each section of the site and its functionality. We will, of course, help you each step of the way with suggestions, tips and practical advice about what works and what doesn't.

Things we don't do!

Please note that we do not provide full Flash animation websites as they are NOT search engine friendly, have inherent security breach issues, depend on fast line speeds and are also not effective for mobile computing at this stage. Animations that we provide are restricted to small banners and advert-type graphics.

How do we keep our costs so low?

We use the concept of the "WWW Global Village" in that all communications with you are via either the telephone or email. So we don't have to charge you for travelling costs and on-site meetings. You provide all the information for your website (text and photographs or images) via email so there is no postal costs or cd-cutting required.