Phosys web design

Phosys web design

New Phosys packages – and a rebrand!

Phosys “Web Design”

Since 2004 Phosys have been building websites with no setup costs for a monthly subscription. The price of this has never altered in all this time. Our emphasis has always been on the quality of our sites, and we’ve always created our sites from scratch – giving the customer exactly what they want.

What made us different?

Back in 2004, we were the first company to specifically offer completely bespoke photography websites with fully integrated online proofing and e-commerce – something that no-one else still really offers today.

Website design is a complicated and time consuming business, and as the years have passed it has become even more of an art. A bespoke website is the ultimate tool for search engine optimisation and giving your business the professionalism that it deserves. Sites that are built from a template are looking better than they used to be, but they still don’t stand out from the crowd or perform as well as a custom-made website.

Why have we changed our business model?

Back in 2004, we used to be able to create a website in a couple of days. The photographer would generally be happy with the first design that we made and the site would be built and deployed. The feature set was fairly small – contact forms, online albums and galleries.

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However, now there are so many features that we are asked to add, so many different browsers that need to be targeted and tested, and there is so much investigation and design work to make the site really stand out, a design can run into several weeks including the consultations and changes that have to be made with the photographer.

As the build durations stretched ever longer, and client requests becoming more detailed and discerning, it became clear that we needed to update our business model to cope. We continue to employ professional website designers and our experience and skill is our greatest asset – but with the sites taking longer we found ourselves with much less time to devote to each project. We were not prepared to sacrifice on the quality of our website design, so we decided to make some changes to the way we structure our pricing.

We’ve maintained a waiting list of new customers for the past 5 years.

Our original and most popular package was £35 per month, with a minimum term of 12 months, or £390 for the year. £390 for a full-fledged, feature-rich e-commerce website from a professional agency is an outrageously low price. For this reason we relied on customers remaining with us for longer than their minimum term in order to recoup the costs in developing them.

We have mostly been able to do this thanks in part to our wonderful customer support team who are forever helpful, friendly and ready to give advice on the phone or via email. We also offer free updates to customers’ websites, assuming they don’t take up a lot of time. We have been incredibly popular as a result of all this – we’ve maintained a waiting list of new customers for the past 5 years.

What are the changes?

Bigger websites will cost a little more to host, sites without e-commerce will cost a little less.

Thanks to the ever-increasing build times we have made the decision to move the Phosys pricing structure into the realms of traditional web design pricing and charge for building the site. We feel this makes our pricing more transparent; it’s clear that the design and development is the costly part of the process and the hosting and on-going support generally require less of our time and expertise.

We’ve decided to charge a one-off setup fee to cover the design and build of our websites – and a much lower monthly fee for the hosting. Bigger websites will cost a little more to host, sites without e-commerce will cost a little less.

How does this affect existing customers?

Basically it doesn’t.

Existing customers can keep on paying the same rates that they have always done. If they wish to have their sites redesigned, they can take advantage of the existing redesign fee and still remain on their current pricing structure. However, if they wish to use the new structure to lower the monthly payments, we will offer a discount on our standard prices.

What about support?

We will offer the same level of support to all our customers as we’ve always done, regardless of the package that they’re on. Our customers know that they can rely on us to aid them with their problems and know that we go over and above to help them out.

 

What else has changed?

In addition to our new packages we’ve also relaunched www.phosys.com and the website editor our customers use to update their websites. We’ve aimed for a bright, fresh new look and we hope you like the new style! We’ll post a longer article on our new branding at a later date. You can read about our new webapp here.

 

Iain Fildes
Managing Director

 

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