Some clients, unfortunately, are under the misconception that a website is an instant remedy for low sales. IT IS NOT.

Your new website is only one tool in your arsenal of sales and marketing techniques.

• You website shows to your client that you are committed to your business and not a fly-by-night business.
• You should market you website just as hard, if not harder, than what you market your products. Every day. Use our 17 Tips workbook for some ideas.
• If marketing is not you niche (Marketing is not our niche, we use professional marketers to market our website and services, and professional sales persons to do the hard selling. We build websites – that is what we are good at), get the professionals on your team. We will be happy to share the contact details of our marketers and sales persons with you.

Never expect your new website to be a miracle performer. You have to market it with passion before it will become a star.

The most likely cause for us to disable your website and email is because of non-payment. Please keep the following in mind:

• You should read our terms and conditions (T&Cs) before you conduct business with us.
• The moment you engage with us, you accept our T&Cs.
• Our T&Cs clearly stipulate the following:
  • It is your responsibility to ensure your payments reach us, not ours.
  • Penalties are incurred for late payments.
• We do not have time to follow up on non-payments, especially EFT payments. If you skip one payment we assume that was an accident, we charge you a penalty and send you a payfast request for payment – this is the only communication you will receive from us regarding a skipped payment. If you skip a second payment, we disable your site and email. We much rather use our time on building relationships with paying clients than trying to rehabilitate non-paying clients.
• Once an account is in arrears and a site and e-mail disabled, it will not be enable again until the account is settled in full.
• If you don’t inform us that you are cancelling your account with us you will be responsible for any billed amounts until your domain reaches end-of-life. Once your domain expired we will stop billing you, and we also will not renew your domain. You still will have an account to pay.
• If you need a person other than yourself to receive your statements you should inform us of the name and email address of the person responsible for your account going forward.
• When you choose to pay via EFT (NOT AN OPTION TO NEW CLIENTS ANYMORE – THIS ONLY APPLIES TO CLIENTS STILL USING THIS METHOD) it is your responsibility to ensure that you make your manual monthly payments, or that the stop order you set up takes place. We have no control over any form of automation should you prefer not to make payment via payfast.
• We INSIST clients using payfast payments (NO CASH, NO EFT). When using payfast future recurring amounts will be charged against the account from which you made your payment. This is the only way in which we can automatically recover invoiced amounts from you.
• The most likely reason for a payfast payment to fail is a lack of funds, or change of a card. A change of card usually happens when you report it as stolen, or it reaches it expiry date.
• When your payfast payment fail we will send you a payfast payment request to catch up again. DO NOT IGNORE PAYFAST PAYMENT REQUEST WE SEND TO YOU – WHEN YOU RECEIVE THESE IT MEANS YOUR ACCOUNT IS IN ARREARS AND WE NEED YOU TO MAKE A PAYMENT.

Our monthly fees covers hosting for your site for the next month (we pay our service providers in advance, and all your payments will also be in advance). Time for monthly maintenance are covered which includes backups, restore tests, minor updates and security fixes. It also will cover future domain fees we may have to pay. However, the following are excluded:

• Annual or monthly fees for any themes you wish for us to use and that are not free.
• Annual or monthly fees for any plugins you wish for us to use and that are not free.
• Annual or monthly fees for any domain names you wish for us to use and that are not in our packet of free domain names we pay on your behalf should we register your domain.
• Major additional work you wish for us to undertake on your website.

We charge setup fees to cover the initial costs we incur when setting up your website. This will cover the first few hours of work, registration fees for your domain (if we register it), creation of accounts and some admins fees that goes with that. Also, hosting for the initial period until the end of the current month.

We use a combination of both. We save time by using templates. Rather than building your site up from the ground, installing WordPress, security plugins, and themes, we can save a day or two by using templates. Depending on which theme you select, we will have different degrees of flexibility as to what functions and display we can add to your site. We can customise both our themes to such a degree that your site will have a completely different appearance to the next site. However, we always aim to ensure that basic design principles are adhered to, for example we always try to have a funnel effect on your main page.

A combination of both. All our “staff” are freelancers, working from home, at their own business hours. We will assign a webmaster to you to take care of your site, usually the one with least projects going on at the time when you sign up. However, we trained all our Webbies to work in a way we want them to work, and according to our standards. We have rules they need to adhere to, and we are strict when it comes to that. Two of the rules we are hardest on is regular communications with their clients, and no excuse for not sticking to our website design and maintenance rules – we do not remind them about those, if they don’t, and we notice that (we have all kinds of measures to check on our Webbies), they are out.

This is a tricky question to answer. Two primary factors are involved, your requirement for your site, and the time we wait for you to supply us with answers and content. We have completed basic websites within two weeks, e-commerce websites within a month where we had full co-operation from the owners. Yes, it is possible to complete a website within a day, we have done that – but then you look at basic website with only required information.

All our Webbies are freelancers. This makes it hard for them to commit to specific working hours, even harder to attend to phone calls. All communications take place using e-mail (preferred) or WhatsApp text (no voice notes or calls). We will ask you questions, you reply when you can, we work on the information you supplied as soon as we can, and then send more questions. This has work for all our clients from Louis Trichardt to Cape Town.

As far as content is concerned: we allow half an hour per site per month – (We may invoice you for more time) for minor updates and changes. We understand that your world changes as much as ours does, you may want us to add new team members, new testimonials, or you moved office, and we need to change your address. If you own an e-commerce site, we will teach you how to load and edit your products, and how to manage orders.

To give you the best advise we will start by asking you questions on your products or services, your intention to sell online, and if so, what shipping methods you use or intend to use. We also will ask you to let us have links to all your social media accounts so we can get a feel of your products, colours you like to use in for example your logos.

We run continuous updates to ensure the security of your site, preventing hacker to get in and take control. We also run regular automated backups to make sure we can restore your site should disaster strike. However, our webmasters run two forced backups and one restore test per month on your site.

We build all our site on WordPress, and e-commerce sites on WooCommerce. Our themes use either Redux or Elementor.

The answer is simple: If you offer any kind of service or product, be it for profit or not, you can ONLY benefit from having an online presence in the form of a website

Yes! These two products complement each other. Your website is there to provide all the information your visitors need to make buying decisions in your favour and provides a secure check-out system for online buyers. Your social media accounts are used to promote your products, share information, and lead followers to your website where transactions can be executed in a safe environment.

Yes, you do! Your social media messages, contact information, and replies simply disappear into the big black hole of the internet. When someone needs information, all that is relevant is ordered on your website, and easily accessible to visitors, rather than aimlessly scrolling through posts or seeing irrelevant results of social media searches.

EFT is an alternative method of payment you should offer your clients for none-subscription purposes. Most of our products are subscription products and we find it better to manage (from both our side and from the client’s side). We do allow EFT on non-subscription products, and you should too.

If you attend markets to extend the reach of your business, and use the services of iKhokha, we can also configure iKhokha on your website as an alternative method of payment for your clients.

We prefer to use Payfast (payfast.co.za) for our online payments system. Their fees are reasonable, they have a variety of payment options, and they have the added advantage of allowing subscription – not too many options for South Africans in that department. We do recommend you use the same for online payment.

If you attend markets to extend the reach of your business, and use the services of Yoco, we can also configure Yoco on your website as an alternative method of payment for your clients.