Most are built for the meeting. The ranking part gets promised for later, and later never comes.Was the last website built to look good in the meeting, or to be found afterwards?
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Website Design and Build for South African Businesses
Website design and build is the work of planning, writing, designing and coding a website from the ground up, then putting it live on your own domain. We build on a headless CMS: your content is stored in one place, Next.js turns it into finished pages in advance, and Vercel serves each page from a computer close to whoever asked for it. The result opens in well under a second on a phone, which is the first thing Google checks and the first thing a visitor feels.
We do not sell a build on its own. Every package includes a ten-page website, and the copy for every one of those pages is written as part of the build, not left as "lorem ipsum" for you to fill in at midnight. Foundation starts at R4,500 a month with a once-off setup fee of R7,500, and pages over the ten are R500 each.
The site is built to be found, not only to be looked at. Each page carries its title, meta description, FAQ and schema markup from day one, and the structure is set so the articles published later have somewhere to link into.
What a website build from Zahavah Studio includes
The build is the same for every package. What changes between packages is how many new pages you get each month once the site is live.
- Keyword research and a page plan before anything is designed, so each of the ten pages answers a search your customers type
- Design in your brand, built for a phone first, since that is where most South African visitors arrive from
- Copy for every page, written to the same editorial standard as the articles
- On-page SEO on every page: title, meta description, headings, FAQ and schema markup, image alt text
- Technical SEO built in: speed, clean code, a sitemap, indexing set up in Search Console from launch
- A contact form, Google Business Profile and analytics connected, and the site live on your own domain
Why a headless CMS on Next.js and Vercel
A CMS, short for content management system, is the software where the words and pages of a website live. The common kind welds the editing side and the visitor side into one slow bundle, with a stack of plugins along for the ride. A headless CMS splits the two apart. Your content sits in one place, and a separate, faster system shows it to the world.
Next.js is the tool we use to build the visitor pages, and Vercel is the service that stores the finished site and serves it from wherever the reader is. Because each page is built in advance rather than assembled on the spot for every visitor, it opens fast, and it stays fast as the site grows to hundreds of pages. We set out the full comparison against the traditional all-in-one website in the articles below, and it is not one-sided: a headless build is the right answer for a site meant to grow, and the wrong one for a five-page brochure nobody will touch again.
How the build runs
- Overview: we look at the current site if there is one, what the business sells, and the exact phrases customers use to find it
- Plan: ten pages are mapped to those phrases, and the keyword map and site structure are agreed before design starts
- Build: design, copy and code come together on our platform, and you review the pages before they go live
- Launch: the site goes live on your domain with redirects from any old addresses, Search Console connected, and the sitemap submitted
- Grow: the new pages in your package start the month after launch, each one linked into the site you now have
The setup fee is paid at signing and the build starts once it is received. Every package runs for a minimum of six months, then month to month.
What the cheap end of the market leaves out
A template with a page builder on top can be live in a week, and the price of it arrives later: a home page nobody waits six seconds for on a phone, a plugin update at 11pm, and copy written by whoever had a spare afternoon. Google measures the speed, reads the copy, and ranks accordingly. The redesign sold to fix it two years on changes the paint and leaves the engine alone.
We build the engine first. The design sits on top of it, and the content that earns the rankings has a fast, readable site to live on from the first month.
Questions people ask about website design and build
How much does a website cost in South Africa?
We do not sell a build on its own. Every package includes a ten-page website on Next.js and Vercel, hosted and cared for, from R4,500 a month on Foundation with a once-off setup fee of R7,500. Pages over ten are R500 each. A cheap template build costs less on the invoice and more over the two years it fails to rank.
How long does a website build take?
The ten pages are planned, written, designed and put live within the first month of the package, once the setup fee is received and we have what we need from you: your logo, your services, and access to your domain. Larger sites with extra pages take longer, and we agree the date before the build starts.
Do you write the content for the website?
Yes. The copy for every one of the ten pages is written as part of the build, to the same standard as the articles we publish. You review each page before it goes live. Most website builds hand you an empty template and a deadline; we do not.
Will the website rank on Google?
It is built to: fast pages, clean code, on-page SEO on every page, and a structure the later articles link into. Rankings themselves are decided by Google, not by us, and any provider who guarantees a position is selling you the guarantee, not the position. What we guarantee is the work, done in full and on time.
Read the thinking behind this
Start with the Complimentary Website Overview.
We look at what you have, what your customers search for, and what a site built to be found would look like for your business.