Archive for May, 2006

Small & Medium Business Website Costs in South Africa (upfront & ongoing)

When consulting with a new potential client, the biggest fundamental question is – “do you want to be able to update the web site yourself (lets call this “option A” or “dynamic”) or do you want to have to employ a programmer to do it for you (lets call this “option B” or “static”).”

At White Wall Web, we only do option A type sites and I will explain below why I believe that this is the only way for a business to run a website effectively. The crux of the issue revolves around scalability and website management issues – but there are also hidden costs associated to running a static site. Below I go into further detail about costs and motivation for using option A, but let me also first explain why we developed our own CMS (Content Management System) which is called WebStream.

1. Because we can – many web site companies don’t have the skills in house to do this. Often they use open source or proprietary products to provide CMS sites for their clients (which is completely legitimate). We on the other hand are a web application development company and our core business is building bespoke web products.
2. We couldn’t find any open source CMS products that worked the way we wanted them to.
3. We didn’t want to pay the high license fees for the good proprietary CMS products and then have to pass those fees on to our clients.
4. We wanted to build a framework that we could use to build larger more complex apps on top of, and could not see the logic in having this framework separate from our CMS framework. This also gives our ‘smaller’ CMS clients a more cost effective upgrade path.

Basic web principle: A good website is useful to the end user. A useful website has regular changing content.
With that in mind, lets look at the details of costs and the difference between option A and option B…