Website support for UK businesses, from a team that is not in the UK
Outsourced website management for UK companies, delivered remotely from South Africa and priced in pounds. Here is what that actually means in practice.
Most of the UK businesses we speak to have already decided they need someone looking after their website properly. What they have not decided is whether that someone can sit in another country.
It is a fair question, and it usually comes down to six or seven practical things rather than anything philosophical. So rather than a sales pitch, here are the answers.
If you want the commercial detail instead, the three plans and what each includes are set out on the services page, and how the month actually runs is covered separately.
The questions UK clients actually ask
Where are you based?
Johannesburg, South Africa. We work with UK businesses remotely and we are not a UK company, which we would rather say plainly than bury. Who we are covers the people behind it.
What hours do you work compared to us?
South Africa is one to two hours ahead of the UK, depending on the time of year. In practice the working day overlaps almost entirely. We are at our desks before you are and still working through your afternoon, so it is a shared day rather than a handover to somebody who is asleep when you need them.
Do you invoice in pounds?
Yes. Pricing and invoicing are both in GBP, so there is no exchange rate to track and nothing moves between the quote and the invoice. The current plan pricing is published rather than quoted on request.
Who would we actually be contracting with?
The Web Department is the trading name of The Think Tank (Pty) Ltd, a registered South African company, registration number 2022/514260/07. A real entity you can look up, rather than a trading name with nothing behind it.
Is this cheap offshore development?
No, and it is worth being direct about that. The work is done by senior people on a monthly retainer and the pricing reflects it. If the lowest hourly rate is what matters most, there are plenty of cheaper options and we would genuinely rather you used one of them. What you should actually pay for website support goes into what the numbers buy at each level.
How is our data handled?
The Web Department is operated by The Think Tank (Pty) Ltd in South Africa. We process personal information under POPIA and, where it applies, UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018 and PECR. Some of the service providers we use process data in South Africa, the UK, the EEA or the US, and where the law requires a safeguard for an international transfer we put an appropriate mechanism in place. In practice the site runs over HTTPS, access to systems holding personal information is restricted to people who need it, and information is kept only as long as it is needed. The full detail is in our privacy policy.
Ways of working: what does a month actually look like?
We meet at least once a month. On that call we review how the site is performing and agree what needs doing next, working from our reporting, a brief from you, or both.
Those priorities go into your dedicated portal as tasks and we work through them in order. Every task and its status stays visible there.
Between calls you approve work, give feedback and add ad-hoc tasks in the same place, without waiting for the next call. How it works has the rest.
What happens if something breaks during our working day?
We work standard business hours, and because South Africa is only one to two hours ahead of the UK, those are your hours too rather than a handover to someone who is asleep. Anything urgent goes to the top of the priority order. We do not publish a fixed response-time SLA, because at our size we would rather tell you honestly what we can do than commit to a number we cannot hold.
Do you only work with UK businesses?
No. We work with South African clients as well, and the model works anywhere the working day overlaps reasonably. The UK is simply where most of our current focus sits. Why UK businesses outsource website work to South Africa covers the wider picture.
Who this is not for
If your website is a formality that nobody really visits, an ongoing retainer is the wrong purchase and you should not make it. If you need one thing fixed once a year, you want a freelancer by the hour. And if you are commissioning a large platform build, we are not the right size for it.
This works when the website matters commercially, needs to keep getting better rather than merely staying online, and there is nobody internally with the time or the range to do that. Agency, freelancer, or in-house sets out the four options honestly, including where we do not fit.
Want to know whether this would work for your website?
Tell us what the site needs to do and where it is falling short. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right answer.
Let's talk
