For those small business owners and young start-ups looking for low-cost web designing and development, WebsiteMesh.com is probably the right choice. The site offers smart web design solutions at an affordable price.

WebsiteMesh is a packaged-based website design service for people who want to own websites easily, fast, and within a reasonable budget. Websites on WM are often in 3 packages, namely, Blogs, Business Websites and Social or Community Websites).

WebsiteMesh’s Blog package offers Internet entrepreneurs an opportunity to start and build a personal blog (or weblog) that can generate revenue, while the Business website package is targeted at small businesses who want to sell products information and services on the Internet. Community Websites packages which could be a blog network, a social networking utility or a portal with a CMS driven forum, is based on WordPress MU, which means your users will be able to have their own independent blogs, themes, and styles plus various plug-ins per blog.

WebsiteMesh provides features such as forums, Peer-to-Peer networking, multi-user blogging, and above all, an enterprise level support to keep you social networking business up and kicking. There are over 1,000 templates to choose from, each designed to fall within a package, and tested to pass the usability and accessibility mark.

Mutiu Okediran recently did an interview with Damilare Onajole, one of the founders of WebsiteMesh, and here’s what Dami had to say:

WebsiteMesh.com’s ultimate goal is to get lots of small businesses in Nigeria on the internet, this would then be followed with a massive reliance on internet media for business growth. Internet usage is growing tremendously in the country, but small businesses are not catching up. We did a survey and discovered that the cost and ease of getting a website discourages most entrepreneurs, so we made pricing our edge. With as low as 15,000 a small business will get a complete website package with a content management system to manage his ‘online office’

Read more on Dami’s interview here on StartupsNigeria.

How does it work?

Once you choose a package and a template, your website would be setup within 4 days. You can then login into your customer account panel and would be given support from WebsiteMesh’s admin. The idea of the site is to make website startups as seamless as possible, thus open source applications like WordPress are used as a basic platform.

How much does it cost?

The cost of getting a website with WebsiteMesh depends on the packaged template chosen, and the options you choose. You can use the costing form to get instant cost of every template, package and options available.

My opinion

I think that this web design/marketing strategy by WebsiteMesh would give them an strong edge to cater for those markets that are yet to be tapped in Nigeria. The cost is quite reasonable and affordable for small businesses in Nigeria.

My hope is that small businesses in Nigeria take advantage of this web design service to launch their businesses on the web.