Web Design and Development in Kenya

What’s included

Everything a website needs, in one engagement

Content and photography: the real cause of late launches

Almost every website project that runs late in Kenya runs late for the same reason. The build is finished and the words are not. The team meant to write the service pages is busy running the business, the photographs are whatever was taken at a function three years ago, and the project sits at ninety per cent for two months.

So we settle it at scoping rather than discovering it in week five. There are three workable answers, and we agree which one applies before the project starts:

Stock images lose to real ones in every measure that matters, and visitors recognise the difference immediately. What does not work is leaving any of the three undecided and hoping it resolves itself while the build runs.

One practical rule saves a lot of pain: nothing is built around content that does not exist yet. A page with a placeholder is a page that ships with a placeholder.

What takes how long, and why

A business website runs two to three weeks and a larger or more custom build four to five. Those are working ranges we quote against, not marketing figures, and the variable that moves them most is not design complexity. It is decisions and content.

1. Week 1 · discovery and structure

   What pages exist, what each one has to do, and what the site is competing against. Ends in a written scope.

2. Week 1 · design

   The reusable templates every page is built from, reviewed with you before any production code is written.

3. Weeks 2–3 · build

   Hand-written front end against the performance budget. Length depends on unique templates and integrations, not page count.

4. Final week · content, testing, launch

   Content loaded, tested on a real mid-tier Android, the pre-publish checklist run, then launch and monitoring.

Two things reliably add time: review rounds that take a fortnight to come back, and scope added mid-build. We quote a fixed number of review rounds and a written change process for exactly that reason, so a delay is visible and attributable rather than a mystery both sides argue about at the end.

If you have a fixed external date, a trade show, a campaign, a funding milestone, say so at the start. We will either commit to it in the scope or tell you plainly that it is not realistic, which is more useful than agreeing and missing it.

How many pages a Kenyan business site actually needs

Most businesses ask for more pages than they need and fewer than they should have in the places that matter. A twenty-page site with one thin page per service converts worse than an eight-page site where each service page answers everything a buyer asks.

The working shape for most firms is:

Everything else should earn its place, including the blog. A neglected news section with three posts from 2023 costs credibility rather than adding it.

Where a business serves several towns or several sectors, that is a structural decision rather than a content one: separate pages only where there is genuinely different substance to write, with internal links that make the relationship clear. Near-identical pages with a place name swapped compete with each other and rank for neither.

We map that structure with you before design, because it is far cheaper to argue about it on a page of notes than after eight templates have been built.

Search foundations that belong in the build

A website is not an SEO campaign, but a build either gives search work a foundation or leaves it fighting the site. These are unglamorous, and they are ours to get right:

Speed is part of it. A site held under two seconds on a mid-range Android on Kenyan mobile data is doing something no amount of later optimisation can retrofit cheaply, because the weight is designed out rather than compressed after the fact.

What a build does not do is guarantee rankings. Competing for valuable Kenyan search terms takes sustained content and authority work, which is SEO, scoped separately and honestly. What we can promise is that when you do invest in it, you will not first have to pay to undo the structure of your own website.

Accessibility, and why it is a commercial decision

We build to WCAG 2.2 AA as standard: text contrast that passes, every control reachable and usable by keyboard with a visible focus state, touch targets large enough for a thumb, labels tied to form fields, images with meaningful alternative text, and no meaning carried by colour alone.

This is usually presented as a compliance matter. In practice it is a commercial one:

It is also far cheaper as a build decision than as a retrofit. Contrast and focus states designed into the system cost nothing extra; correcting them across a finished site is a project of its own, which is why so many sites never do it.

How enquiries actually reach you

A business website has one job above the others: to turn a visitor into a conversation. In Kenya that conversation usually starts on WhatsApp, sometimes on a phone call, and less often through a form. A site that offers only a contact form is quietly filtering out most of the people who wanted to reach you.

We build all three routes, and make each one work properly:

Where an enquiry lands matters as much as how it is sent. A form that posts to an address nobody monitors is the most common silent failure we find on Kenyan sites, and it can run for months without anyone noticing. We confirm the destination with you, add a second recipient where it makes sense, and record every submission on the site itself so nothing depends on email delivery alone.

The same applies to what happens next. We will tell you plainly if the site is generating enquiries that are not being answered, because at that point the website is doing its job and the business is not.

Redesign, rebuild, or leave it alone

Not every site that looks dated needs replacing, and some sites that look fine should be rebuilt. The question is what is actually wrong. If the structure and content are sound and the site is simply unfashionable, a visual refresh is the cheaper answer. If it is slow at the foundation, built on a page builder nobody can maintain, or structured around services you no longer sell, a rebuild costs less over four years than repeatedly patching it.

Where a rebuild is right, the existing site is an asset rather than a blank slate. Pages that already attract search traffic are identified and carried across, every old URL is mapped to its closest new one with a single redirect hop, and the structured data, canonicals and sitemap are checked on staging. That discipline is what separates a rebuild that keeps its rankings from the far more common version that loses half its traffic in a month.

Full rebuilds of an existing site are covered under website redesign, which follows the same process with migration work added.

What happens after launch

Launch day is the start of the site’s working life, not the end of the project. In the first thirty days we monitor for errors, check that forms and payments are arriving where they should, watch the search console for indexing problems, and confirm the performance budget is holding with real content and real traffic on it.

From there, some clients run the site themselves with the documentation, and some move onto a support and maintenance plan for updates, monitoring, backups and a monthly change allowance. Either is fine. What we will not do is make the site dependent on us in order to sell you the second thing.

Is this the right fit?

Honest about who we are, and aren’t, for