THE ANSWERS.
I’m sure you have a lot of questions concerning projects, workflow, pricing, communication, tech support, and the BKS Shop – hopefully you find these answers helpful…and if not, feel free to contact me anytime.
The actual cost of a project depends on whether your project is a website (e.g. “yoursite.com”), a service (e.g. site maintenance), or a creative asset (e.g. a logo, icon, background, etc.).
The short pricing formulas are as follows:
WEBSITES = Domain/Hosting Plan Cost + Price Per Page Cost + Template Cost + Premium Plugin Costs + Support Plan Cost.
Example: Hostinger “Business” Domain & Hosting Plan (roughly $192 + tax) + 10-Page Standard Website (at $28/page = $280) + No Template + No Premium Plugins + Support Plan ($90/mo.) = $562 + Hostinger Plan tax…just remember the $90/mo. for support (paid monthly).
In the end, your total expenses depend entirely on your own feature selections.
Renewing expenses (such as premium plugins) have their own payment schedules – you will need to visit the third-party developer sites for those plugins to purchase and download the relevant upgraded plugin files and forward them to BKS as compressed “.Zip” files (e.g. “kadence-blocks-pro.zip”) to upload to your WordPress site…or simply upload them yourself following this walkthrough.
SERVICES = $14/hr.
CREATIVE ASSETS = Priced by total project hours at a rate of $14/hr.
After years of research, observation, and experience, it’s clear that the old “meet-and-greet” and “conference call” models are no longer effective methods for completing web-based projects. It is highly inefficient in two specific areas: (1) Time Management (due to discussion redundancies), and (2) Work-Life Balance (for all parties involved, due most often to mistakes made through miscommunication of intents/purposes and/or design preference clashes, or to life disruptions brought on by incessant calls/texts by the other party).
In order to effectively serve the needs of multiple clients looking to develop their own brands, websites, and content marketing strategies simultaneously – without forcing long wait periods or denying projects outright – BKS has determined the “verify and apply” model (i.e. verify availability and submit an application) to be far superior. The concept isn’t foreign – it’s been around for as long as people have built businesses and the governments to regulate them.
Oftentimes, meetings and over-the-phone discussions can fail to communicate significant details, requiring further discussions, and more calls/emails, and further clarification of points made during those calls/emails…you get the idea. Time saved is money saved – the less time wasted covering the same talking points, the more time can be spent finishing the actual project…and the less that project may cost overall as a result.
It’s a win-win, and a no-brainer. Welcome to the New Way to do Web Projects.
Blue Knight Studios does NOT offer 24/7 live tech support – however, you may opt for a monthly Support Plan to include site maintenance with your project if you are unfamiliar with WordPress or would like to take a more hands-off approach to managing your site (see pricing on the homepage). BKS will require access to your Hostinger server in order to directly manage maintenance tasks which cannot be completed in the WordPress dashboard (specifically, security hardening, cache clearing, and other necessary jobs) – in this case, you will need to invite BKS to co-manage your server. Here’s a helpful video on how to do so: How to Give Access For Manage Hostinger Account (Step by Step).
The BKS Support Plan includes basic site maintenance activities to keep your site up-and-running without any major issues – in general, it takes very little time to execute – nevertheless, time is dedicated daily to this task to ensure your site remains functional at all critical hours. Additionally, minor optimizations (such as the compression and re-uploading of large, slow-loading images/photos) will be made to keep your website loading under 3-seconds (if possible).
Yes, all purchases of BKS websites and templates come with lifetime access to the BKS Creative Asset Library. You will receive the password to access this page via email, and you are responsible for safeguarding it from others. The password may change from time-to-time, but you will be notified of this change whenever it occurs.
In the event you make a purchase through the BKS Shop and your file(s) fail to download, you may submit a Support Ticket through the form located at the bottom of the homepage (in this case, you do not need to have a Support Plan in place before submitting your request). Pending confirmation of the sale on BKS’ end via Stripe, your purchased file(s) will be sent to you directly. All sales through the BKS Shop are final, as all products in the Shop are digital in nature and there is no way to prevent their distribution once downloaded – therefore, to prevent fraud and abuse, no refunds will be given for any purchases made through the BKS Shop.
Wix, Weebly, SquareSpace, Shopify, and other “all-in-one” site-building platforms may be easy to use, but they have major drawbacks when it comes to customization (especially of the admin panel itself), as well as ownership (in these cases, the PLATFORMS own your site…and can take it down whenever they want and for whatever reasons they choose)…also, their marketplace of apps (and how effectively the API’s for those apps actually communicate with each other) isn’t exactly impressive. It used to be the case that you could purchase a website on these platforms for cheap, but with the rising costs for conducting online transactions and the increasing costs for maintenance, labor, and improvements on their end, the costs of these platforms (passed on to customers) is far above what they’re worth today.
Elementor is a great site-editing plugin for WordPress beginners who have no experience with the platform’s native Full-Site Editor (Gutenburg). However, its heavy dependence upon CSS and JavaScript makes virtually any medium-to-large site built with it slow-to-load and unresponsive on mobile compared to its native competitor – not to mention it’s most important features are hidden behind a paywall and the plugin’s heavy coding tends to negatively impact SEO.
By contrast, adding the FREE “Kadence Blocks” and “Admin & Site Enhancements” plugins to WordPress offers a significantly more powerful toolset allowing you to have full creative control over your site’s design with lightweight coding that helps your SEO – and the paid versions are even better!
I take site speed, creative control, and content ownership very seriously when it comes to choosing partners and plugins for a new website – I won’t settle for anything less than the best, and neither should you!
The short answer is: Features and Cost.
There isn’t a better service out there that has the reliability and security Hostinger offers at the prices it asks. Yes, your initial plan will increase in price over the long-term (typically beginning after renewal of your hosting plan at the 5-year mark), but really…is that even a bad thing? Why pay the inflated costs asked by other providers (most often, UP-FRONT) if you don’t even have a functioning online store yet? Wouldn’t you rather start your business with a net positive cash flow, rather than constantly dipping into the red and stressing over payments?
Where else can you get a FREE Domain Name, SSL Certificate (to get that “HTTPS” thing going), Cloudflare CDN connection (to distribute your site quickly across the globe, allowing users to cache your site for faster load times), daily backups, and 50GB of NVMe storage for FOUR YEARS for LESS THAN $200? AND you can “cancel at any time”?
SiteGround may be good, and StellarSites may be the future, but NOBODY beats Hostinger today.
No. BKS is all hands-on when it comes to web design, templates, and custom graphics. Admittedly, AI has come a long way, especially in its ability to automate menial marketing and general workflow tasks. However, when it comes to highly custom web projects, AI lacks the emotional intelligence and contextual reasoning required to adequately produce designs which center around engaging human emotions. Large Language Models (or, “LLMs”) can spit out ideas for templates all day long…but at the end of the day, they still feel like pre-packaged waste. Rest assured, your projects will have a very human touch.
Yes! Blue Knight Studios is here for all your design needs – however, BKS does NOT print and ship the finished physical products…you’ll have to partner with a printing company for that. But, of course, that’s why it’s cheap! You may submit a Project Application for print design work anytime.