Sustainable website design and development
Affordable, sustainable professional websites as standard
At The Ethical Agency, we have been building sustainable websites for over a decade. We’ve had the luxury of working with both small and large organisations across two continents and can rely on that knowledge to help you get the most from a website and achieve your business goals.
No job is too small or too large – we have built everything from simple one-page websites to multi-layered bespoke products.
“Your website is the center of your digital eco-system, like a brick and mortar location, the experience matters once a customer enters, just as much as the perception they have of you before they walk through the door.”
Leland Dieno
Website design as standard
WordPress website design – the most used and trusted website platform in the world.
Responsive websites – professional looking websites on both desktop and mobile devices.
Security – free SSL certificate (the green lock icon) and secure websites.
Image creation & optimisation – creating and processing all the images used on your website.
Content Management System (CMS) – the ability to edit most of the website yourself (some training may be required).
Google site map & analytics – submitting a number of different sitemaps of your website to Google. Registering and installing Google Analytics onto your website.
Search engine submission – submitting your website to Google.
Social media sharing – the inclusion of social media sharing icons on various locations of your website.
Spam protection – of your emails on the website.
Linking your website to Mailchimp – or other newsletter systems.
Data entry – of all your text and image content.
Additional services
Content writing and editing – writing content for your website when you don’t have the time or resources.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – advanced SEO to improve your Google rankings.
Shop front – sell products or services from your website.
Domain name registration – securing and managing your domain name.
Training – helping you learn how to edit the website yourself.
100% renewable energy website hosting – sleep well knowing your website is using clean and sustainable energy!
Rest assured
Affordable and competitive pricing.
Stylish and professional websites.
Legitimate and secure websites.
Low client maintenance.
Decades of experience.
Speedy turnaround.
Sustainable & ethical practices.
Transparent communication.
Different types of websites you can choose from
Off-the-shelf website production
Perfect for budget-conscious projects, an off-the-shelf-template contains a predefined look and feel. We can change the colours, fonts and images so that your website looks unique to you. The website will come standard with five pages, including (as an example) ‘Home’, ‘About’, ‘Products/Services’, ‘Contact’ and ‘Blog.’ We have a number of professional-looking themes for you to choose from.
- The whole process, with client approvals, requesting content, development, content and data entry can take between one to two weeks.
- See a list of off-the-shelf-templates you can choose from.
Bespoke website design and development
For the more established project and when an off-the-shelf website template does not satisfy your needs, you may have a bespoke website design in mind or specific functionality requirements unique to your business.
- Depending on client requirements, completion time can take anywhere between two weeks to two months and more.
- A bespoke website design project will include wireframes, design concept (& reviews), and website development
- We have built bespoke websites for blue-chip clients and smaller companies who rely on their website to manage specific aspects of their business.
So much more than a website
There is a lot that goes into building a website, from our point of view and yours. First, you need to ask yourself, “Do I really need a website?”. These days a Facebook page can be just as effective when you are starting out and they don’t cost anything to run. What a website can do is provide in-depth information about your business in exactly the way you require it, presenting engaging content in ways that social media cannot. A website can also help to support any form of marketing campaign. It can serve to legitimise your business offering and become an invaluable tool in securing work as well as retaining clients and customers.
Your business is unique and often you will have unique and specific needs for how your website will look and behave – we call this is a bespoke website. The alternative to bespoke would be an off-the-shelf-template – these are very affordable and can be rolled out in a matter of days. The bespoke websites can take longer as the design and functionality will need to go through a few rounds of review and refinement before the build can start.
Things you should know before you employ a website design company
At The Ethical Agency we are all about transparency:
- Marketing – having a website can be essential but alerting people to its existence is a separate job that will require some time and budget attributed to it. In short, you will need a marketing strategy and plan. At The Ethical Agency, we provide a free generic marketing strategy to all our clients – the marketing strategy is particularly focussed on free and inexpensive marketing ideas.
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – this forms part of the marketing strategy and is how Google will rank your website for specific search terms. The nature of your business will determine how much SEO is required. Whilst there are some fundamental tasks that can be performed to the website to make it SEO ready and Google-friendly, SEO really is a fundamental topic that needs to be addressed before we start to build your website. The actual content and functionality of your website ideally need to be underpinned by your SEO strategy and a large portion of it written exclusively with SEO in mind.
- Maintenance – websites are like cars – the software, plug-ins and hardware need updating at least every three months. Clients should budget for a maintenance plan of 2–3 hours every 3 months and 2 hours every month for larger projects. Within the maintenance work, we provide a report on your website speed, number of website visitors, website security (ensuring no viruses are present and hacking vulnerabilities are resolved).
- Domain name registration – you will need a domain name e.g. ‘mycompany.co.za’ – we can register and manage the domain on your behalf. A ‘.co.za’ costs approximately R200 per year.
- Website hosting – your website will need to be hosted on a website server – we can set this up and manage it for you. Our website is hosted on 100% Renewable energy website servers – the energy used to serve your website to thousands of people is generated from nature; how cool is that right?!
- We charge a small fee for registering your domain name and setting up your website hosting.
Previous website design projects
For a list of projects, please visit our website design portfolio.
Satisfied clients
