South African Website Design Company

Budget Websites Fixed-Width Website Design

If your budget is very tight, then this is the option for you, but otherwise rather go for a responsive (mobile-friendly) website instead

Regardless of whether you choose a responsive website or a fixed-width website, we will produce something beautiful and functional for you. Designing websites is our speciality. We don't use templates - our web designs are 100% unique and designed from scratch just for you. Each website is hand coded in HTML5 together with CSS, resulting in W3C standards compliance and accessibility. Additionally, we test each website in all popular browsers to make sure that they are cross-browser-friendly. Website graphics are optimized for web to ensure fast loading speeds and well-thought out navigation helps your customers get what they want quickly.

What is a 'Fixed Width' website

Before the rise of tablets and smart phones, we built all websites with fixed widths - 992 pixels wide to be exact. A website with this width fits perfectly on old square monitors running the standard 1024x768 resolution, and it looks fine on wide-screens. It also fits nicely on most tablets in landscape orientation. Fixed width websites are not mobile-friendly though, so viewing them on tablet in portrait orientation, or on a smart phone can be frustrating because you would need to do a lot of pinching and zooming to navigate and read.

Why are fixed-width websites cheaper?

Fixed-width websites are cheaper simply because they involve much less work. A responsive site (done properly) involves a lot of work to ensure that the website looks great on all devices. With fixed-width websites, we only need to be concerned with one view, and of course that translates to less work. Besides a fixed-width not being mobile friendly, there is nothing else inferior about it.

Who is a fixed-width website good for?

There are two scenarios where a fixed-width website would be appropriate:

1. A responsive (mobile-friendly) website is what you should ultimately strive for, but if you are desperate for a website and simply don't have the funds right now, the fixed-width website is your budget starter option. Later on when you have a bigger budget, you can commission us to upgrade it to a responsive site for you. You would be paying more in total by going this route, than immediately opting for a responsive site at the start, but in most cases, we do deduct most of the old site's cost from the new one.
2. You may have a website that, for whatever reason, is not meant to be viewed on a mobile anyway. Perhaps a company intranet that can only be accessed by work computers might be an example. In this case, there is no point in paying extra for a responsive site.

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Web Design Examples

The below slide-show contains a few fixed-width websites we've designed and built.

Slide Controls

• Desktop Users:
  • Hover over a slide to pause the slide-show and reveal the slide's caption.
  • Click on a slide to launch the website.
• Touchscreen Users:
  • Tap once on a slide to pause the slide-show and reveal the slide's caption.
  • Double Tap on a slide to launch the website.

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Where else can I cut costs, but not corners?

• Domain
  Every website needs a domain (website address that you register and renew yearly). Some domains cost more to renew than others. For example, a .co.za is cheaper to register and renew than a .com. Check out our domain pricing to see what would suit you best.
• Hosting Package
  Except with large websites, it is not usually the website itself that determines the size of the hosting package, but rather the email storage required. When a client wants to be able to sync their emails across devices, emails need to be stored online, and these can quickly fill up a web server. So in this event, we always recommend our largest hosting package, which is also the most expensive. If you were to either not need email syncing, or you host your emails elsewhere, we can then offer you a smaller (and far cheaper) hosting package. See our web hosting page for details and pricing.
• Search Engine Marketing
  We are not a marketing company, but we do offer fundamental SEO at no extra cost, and we offer an affordable (and highly recommended) once-off search engine submissions package. For further marketing, you would need to approach a marketing company, and unfortunately many are complete charlatans. They will quote you for that which has already been done by us, and happily take your money each month while making ineffective modifications to the site. We offer a free service to our clients to advise on deals offered by marketing firms to help weed out the rubbish. More info on our web marketing page.
• Web Maintenance
  If your website requires constant maintenance, then a CMS (content management System) might save you money in the long run, but in many cases, it's more economical to pay for updates as needed. We find that many clients like the idea of being able to update their own sites, but the cost of a CMS does not justify infrequent updates. Also, many clients find that they really don't have the time to update their websites AND do their own work, so end up paying someone else to manage their CMS anyway. Our pay-as-you-go maintenance is very reasonable, and we also offer monthly retainer options. Please enquire with us if you are unsure of what will be best for you.

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What if I still can't afford a website?

In this event, we could suggest one of two things.

• Facebook Page
  You can get yourself a free Facebook page for your business and operate via that medium until you have a customer base that brings you enough money for a proper website.
• Free WordPress Theme
  You can pay us for your domain and hosting only, and we'll install WordPress for you. WordPress is a system that was developed as blogging software, but it has become robust enough to build entire websites with. There are tons of free themes available and lots of guides online how to use it. It will have a learning curve for you and it won't look beautiful like the sites we design, but it won't cost you any extra per month, so in that time you can save up and commission us to build you a custom WordPress theme.

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How do I proceed?

We'd love to answer any questions you may have about our web design services to help you make your decision, so please don't hesitate to drop us an email: . We respond quickly to all queries.