We are in Pietermaritzburg. That is an hour up the N3, which means we can actually sit in the room when it matters.
We publish pages for Johannesburg and Cape Town too, and on both of them the first thing we do is tell the reader we are not local. Durban is different. DEZIGN-IT has been in Pietermaritzburg since 2013, roughly 80 kilometres away.
That is not a marketing line about being part of the community. It is a practical fact with two consequences. We can be in your boardroom for the meetings that genuinely need a room, and we understand the KZN business environment because we operate in it rather than reading about it.
We are also not going to inflate this. Most website work does not require anyone to be physically present, and an agency that insists on monthly in-person status meetings is usually padding something. The drive is available when it is worth it.
It is a common enough path. A Durban business decides it needs something serious, assumes serious means Johannesburg, and ends up with a Gauteng agency.
Two things usually follow. The first is price: an agency carrying an office, parking and an account management layer recovers that cost somewhere, and it is recovered in your quote. The second is attention. You become a modest account at a distance, which is precisely the profile that gets staffed with whoever happens to be free that month.
Sometimes Johannesburg is genuinely the right call, particularly for large, complex builds needing a bigger team than ours. We will say so. But defaulting there because it sounds more serious is an expensive habit.
Durban's economy leans hard on the port and everything downstream of it: freight, warehousing, manufacturing, industrial supply. Those businesses do not need a checkout. They need to survive scrutiny.
The buyer is a procurement manager or an operations director who has been given three suppliers and is working out which ones are real. They are checking whether your capability claims hold up, whether the detail is specific enough to be credible, and whether anyone answers when they make contact. A beautiful site that is vague about what you actually do fails that test instantly.
So for industrial and B2B clients we build for credibility and enquiry rather than conversion theatre. Clear capability, verifiable specifics, contact routes that actually reach a human. The tourism and retail side of Durban is a different brief and we build that differently.
Load shedding. Hosted off your premises with regional redundancy, so the site stays up when the building is dark. Enquiries route to mobile rather than a desk phone nobody is sitting at.
Light pages. Mobile data costs real money here, and a heavy page is a page a prospect abandons. Light is also what Google rewards.
Local payment rails. PayFast, Yoco and Ozow where you sell domestically. International gateways only where you genuinely sell abroad.
POPIA. Consent capture, honest cookie handling and secure data practice built in, plus a plain explanation of where your obligations run past the website.
R5,000 to R30,000 and up. A single landing page at the bottom, a multi-page business site with custom design and written content in the middle, ecommerce and custom builds at the top.
We do not publish fixed packages, because every package price we have seen gets renegotiated the moment the agency sees the real requirements. You get a quote for your project, with the scope written down, before anyone starts.
Pietermaritzburg, and we have been since 2013. That is roughly 80 kilometres from Durban, about an hour on the N3. Of the three cities we publish pages for, Durban is the one where we can genuinely be in the room, and it is the only one of these pages where we make that claim.
For Durban projects, yes, where it is useful. Kickoff, a content workshop, a stakeholder session before sign-off. We are not going to pretend every meeting needs to be in person, because most do not and you are paying for the travel one way or another. But when being in the room genuinely moves the project, the drive is an hour, not a flight.
Plenty of KZN businesses do, and they usually pay Johannesburg rates for it. A Gauteng agency carrying an office, parking and an account management layer has to recover that somewhere, and it is recovered in your quote. You also become a small account at a distance, which is exactly the sort of client who gets staffed with whoever is free.
Yes, and they need something different to a retail site. Durban's economy leans heavily on the port, freight, warehousing and manufacturing, and those businesses rarely sell online. They sell on credibility, capability and a quote request. The website's job is to survive scrutiny from a procurement manager checking whether you are real: clear capability, verifiable detail, working contact routes. Not an ecommerce checkout.
R5,000 to R30,000 and up, depending on scope. A single landing page sits at the bottom. A multi-page business site with custom design and written content sits in the middle. Ecommerce and custom builds sit at the top. We quote your actual project with the scope written down before anyone starts.
The site is hosted off your premises with regional redundancy, so it stays up when your building is dark. The part people forget is the human side: enquiries need to route to a mobile rather than a desk phone nobody is sitting at, and forms need to queue rather than fail when a customer's connection drops mid-submission. We build for that.