Sweet Jam Sites

Like most business owners, we started off using Wordpress too. We loved the ease of starting a Wordpress site, and the familiarity of its CMS for non-tech folks.

But it became clear very quickly that it was a pain having to juggle the constant updates between the Wordpress version, plugins and the theme. A careless Wordpress version update might stop your plugin from working. Similarly, an unwitting plugin update might create problems with your theme. Not updating isn't a good move either, for fear of security holes, meaning hacks, meaning downtime. For any profitable business, we all know downtime = loss of revenue and trust. Maintaining all the required Wordpress plugins to keep your site secure and functional also meant slow page loads, and a perpetual uphill task of keeping it zippy. All these means maintenance is a job in itself, taking precious time and focus away from your business. Outsourcing maintenance to a developer or agency is a solution, but a potentially costly one.

We thought, why pay for all that busy work? With JAMstack, we didn't have to worry about maintenance and speed anymore. So can you.

Business owners of professional services who:

• Have a Wordpress website and is tired of the speed and security issues.
• Don't have a huge budget to hire a web development firm to create a website.
• Don't have recurring budget for web hosting.
• Need a simple, responsive, one-page website for informational purpose, aka a 'business card' website.
• Already have the custom domain, web content and assets (like images, logos) ready to be uploaded.
• Need an online presence to get leads.
• Don't need to perform complex transactions or workflows.
• Don't need to update the web content regularly, if at all.
• Want a done-for-you kind of service, and don't want to DIY and waste time learning another new website builder or CMS.
• Just want to 'set and forget', and focus on the business instead of worrying about the website.
• Want a fast and secure website built on modern web technologies that can handle huge traffic.
• Don't need regular maintenance, or prefer no technical support if ever.
• Run productized/professional services such as management consulting, accounting, design, illustration, web development, software, writing, marketing, coaching, etc.

• Complex/dynamic websites with multiple pages and workflows.
• Custom development of website features like shopping cart or payment page.
• Ecommerce websites, blogs, web apps, events, or anything that requires accounts for your users.
• If you don't have ready content, copy and images for your websites. We don't do that kind of (graphic) design.
• If you need specific design or copywriting services that drives better conversion or UX.
• Regular content updates, posting of blog articles or social media posts.
• Regular maintenance, technical support or further development of new features.
• If you need a website within hours or over a weekend.

OVERVIEW

• A one- or multi-page, responsive website with a custom subdomain or your own custom domain, depending on your tier.
• For $99 tier: One single-page website with custom Netlify subdomains that looks like yourdomain.netlify.com suffix.
• For $199 tier: Multi-page website, and we connect your custom domain to the site, but you will need to buy it yourself off domain providers like GoDaddy or Namecheap.
• For $299 tier: Multi-page website, and we buy the first year of your domain for you from Namecheap, connect it to the site, then transfer the domain to you (for your own renewal from the 2nd year onwards).

FREE WEB HOSTING

• YES! FREE web hosting, as long as Netlify and Github provides free hosting. That means no monthly recurring fees to pay just to keep your website live. All you pay is the once-off fees for us to set up the website for you.
• But note that this excludes domain hosting (that unique web address like example.com that you buy for your business name). This you will have to pay for, on your own.

PAGE STRUCTURE

• Sections within the website includes: Hero, Features, Reviews, Pricing, Contact us/Buy now CTA, FAQs, Contact page/form, About, Footer.
• Any of the above sections can be omitted if you don't have the content (for example, if your business is new and you don't have any testimonials, we can leave it out).
• For Contact forms, you can use our form which will email you directly when there's a response. There's no analytics or customer management system to manage incoming enquires, just plain old email.
• If you have a third-party Contact form (e.g. Google Forms or Typeform) or Payment form (e.g. Paypal or Gumroad), we can add the URL to the CTA buttons if you already have the URL for it. Unfortunately, we won't be able to create payment forms for you.
• To collect customer emails, you can use our in-built subscribe form at the footer. The system will email you directly when there's a subscriber. If you prefer to use your own third-party newsletter provider (e.g. Mailchimp), we can remove this component and add your own newsletter link it to the Social menu in the footer.
• No email hosting. Sorry we don't provide email accounts and email hosting. You can provide us with your email address and we will make sure that any contact form/button gets linked to your email, where needed.

DESIGN & LAYOUT

• Design/layout looks just like Sweet Jam Sites.
• Responsive website for mobile, tablet and laptop screens.
• Illustrations from unDraw or ManyPixels (free for commercial use). We will select the most appropriate ones based on your text provided for business, tagline and features/value proposition.
• 1-3 revisions in total (based on your package), which cannot be rolled over to the future after you have signed off on the website.

TECH STACK

• For those who wants to look under the hood: Website is a JAMstack website built using Stackbit and Gatsby, hosted on a private Github repo and Netlify.
• If the web services stated above that run the website have any downtime, we will inform you and work with them to resolve it. Highly unlikely though - historical uptimes are around 99.98%. No other technical support provided.

We are our own user ourselves, and we built this website using the same technology and process as we would for your website. So this site is the best example of our work. That's truly "eating your own dog food"!

For external customers, check out this site that we did for Good Chat Co., a user recruitment firm for UX research:

https://goodchatco.com/

Yes! For real! Netlify and Github currently offers free hosting, and that's what your site will be built on. The possible downside is that maybe one day they might change tack and start demanding users to pay for hosting. There's certainly a non-zero chance that might happen (and they reserve the right to do so), though it seems unlikely at the near term. Until then, let's enjoy this. We will inform you if anything changes.

And in case you're wondering, there's no ads either!

That's how we can offer our competitive prices! We're set up for a very specific scope of work that's streamlined to be as cost-effective and efficient as possible, so that savings in turn come back to you. That's why we call ourselves a productized service - we package up a service as if it were a product, with a pre-defined list of features, a fixed price and delivery deadline, so that you know exactly what you're getting and getting into. You can see how this really catered to business owners who just want to '"set and forget".

If you're looking for a more open-ended project brief, a design agency or freelance web developer/designer might be a better fit for you.

There are some hard and soft limits based on Netlify's terms of service, but nothing that you are likely exceed if you're running a service business. Also note that you can't use the site as a remote storage server, and hosting large downloads of >10MB might get flagged.

Extracted from Netlify TOS:

"Netlify has certain soft and hard limits in using its service. Hard limits are automatically enforced by the Service. Soft limits are consumable resources that the User agrees not to exceed. The limits are as follows unless otherwise contractually agreed upon.

For free accounts:

• Network Bandwidth: 100GB/month — Soft
• Storage: 100GB — Soft
• API requests: 500 requests/minute, 3 deploys/minute* — Hard

*API limits apply to authorized applications making requests directly to the Netlify API. These limits do not apply to Netlify’s continuous deployment or webhook-triggered deploys."

We typically take 3-5 working days. On good days, you can get it in 1 day!

Sorry, we entrepreneurs, designers and developers are human beings too with lives and families outside of work. So to institute better work-life balance, we decided to not work on weekends. It might be frustrating to some customers as they might need to rush out work urgently. In these cases unfortunately, we will need to decline. We can offer alternative options where you can get your website done over the weekend, but we will not be able to do it. If a work order that takes 3 working days gets confirmed on Friday, we will only be able to deliver on the following Tue or Wed. Weekend days are not included in the turnaround time. We believe in creating an awesome customer experience for you, so this decision was not taken lightly. We hope you will understand our decision that ultimately helps us serve you better by maintaining sanity, preventing burn-out. Happy workers provide happy services! : )

Not at the moment, but that's a possibility that we're currently exploring! Let us know if this is what you want and we'll see what we can do for you.

At this moment, we do not offer services for future site edits/changes after it's signed off. You can see that this is really a service for people who want to 'set and forget'.

But we're not completely closed off to offering edits as a service in the future either. Contact us to discuss if you need to make edits.

One way is to provide you DIY access to the CMS with a top-up fee. Another way is to hire another developer or designer to help you with small edit jobs. We can transfer the Github repo and other accounts to you to facilitate that, at a fee.

All prices stated are in US dollars.

Yes, we’re open to that. Drop us a message using the Contact form to discuss.

We use Stripe for encrypted payment, and it’s absolutely safe. Stripe has been audited by a PCI-certified auditor and is certified to PCI Service Provider Level 1. This is the most stringent level of certification available in the payments industry. Read more here.

We take data protection and privacy seriously. We’ll never email you to solicit sales if you didn’t agree prior. But if you signed up to be on our email lists (you have to sign up separately – buying a product doesn’t sign you up automatically), we’ll email you occasionally whenever there’s new product launches or promos.

We offer a 100% refund guarantee if you're not happy with the final product. We will however, remove the site upon refund.

Sorry we don't offer custom jobs. Unfortunately, we're set up for a very specific scope of work in order to offer our competitive pricing.

Highly unlikely that will happen, but please drop us a message under Contact, and we’ll be in touch asap.

There's no contractually binding uptime available for Netlify as we are using the free tier (that's why it's FREE web hosting!), but historical uptimes had been around 99.98%. No guarantees of course. Similarly for Github.

1. Select the right pricing package, and click on Buy Now.
2. Fill out the form. This is where you can copy and paste your ready content, logo image, and links to the form.
3. You will then be redirected to a payment form. Please pay in full using your credit card details.
4. You will hear from us almost immediately that we had started work on your project. We will come back with your first version of your website within 3-5 days.
5. Give us your comments and feedback on edits and changes. You have limited revisions to do so (as per your package).
6. Sign off. The site will then go live.

My name is Jason and I'm an indie maker. I love making internet products, and web development using JAMstack is something I'm pretty excited about. With Sweet Jam Sites, I hope to help other non-technical entrepreneurs and solo founders get started on JAMstack.

SaaS theme by Stackbit.

Built on Gatsby, hosted on Github and Netlify.

Illustrations by unDraw &/or ManyPixels.

Icon logo made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com