Show HN: SiteZen – Complete Web Design, Hosting and Domain Name for $50 a Month

sitezen.co

6 points·kolemcrae··7 comments

Tip: Before you start selling web design, make sure your own website is designed well.

In particular the white text on grey background in the form here is unreadable: https://sitezen.co/designer.html

I don't see any white text, but I do see badly semi-centered checkbox inputs: http://imgur.com/EQBIzts

Looks interesting. A few questions:

- How do you handle the design process in terms of reviews/changes? Do you just present a design and if the customer doesn't like it then they're out of luck? Or will you make a million changes that drag on forever? (I presume somewhere in the middle... but this is not explained).

- Do the built sites utilize a CMS of some kind (so customers can edit content after it's been built)? Or do content changes need to go through you (as part of the monthly fee I presume)?

- On a more technical note: do you have an in-house platform you build on? Or is it all wordpress (or some other open source CMS)? Or are you re-selling a SaaS CMS like Weebly or Squarespace?

- How extensive can changes be after the site is built? Can I add new pages? What if I want to add a whole new blog section if I didn't have one before? What if I want to start selling products? etc.

Can't find an example site to look at.

That's massively expensive.

I'm guessing this includes the initial design, which would make it ridiculously cheap.

If you're planning on keeping the average customer for 2 years and pay $10 for the hosting itself, that leaves just $960 for the initial design and setup (not to mention 'ongoing updates').

Designers get paid by getting a cut of the monthly fee. Sounds like the designer is absorbing the risk of an early cancellation.

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