SmartLink
Web design & development

The public face of an enterprise system.

SmartLink Services works as a web development company in Karachi, and most of what we build sits on top of a system that already exists. A marketing site for a manufacturer. A dealer portal reading order status straight out of an ERP. A catalogue where stock and price come from one place instead of two. This page answers the commercial questions buyers in Pakistan ask before they shortlist anybody: what the work costs at market rates, how long it takes, whether WordPress is enough, what accessibility and performance actually require, and what a live site costs to keep running. Every figure below is a published market range, not a quotation from us.

Discuss this practice
Design
Research to high fidelity
Build
Speed and search first
Editing
By non-technical staff
Support
Ongoing maintenance
Overview

A portal is only useful if the data behind it is trustworthy.

Web work in an enterprise context is rarely about the website alone. A customer portal showing order status is a promise that the order data is correct and current. A dealer dashboard is a permissions problem before it is a design problem. The interface is the visible part of a system question.

That is why this practice sits alongside the ERP and database work rather than apart from it. We design the journey and the interface properly, with research and wireframes before high fidelity, then build it against the systems that hold the data, with permissions that actually hold.

For corporate sites the priorities are simpler and worth stating: fast, findable, and genuinely editable by the people who own the content. A site that needs a developer for a paragraph change stops being updated within months.

Scope

What Web & digital covers

From a marketing site through to a permissioned partner portal over enterprise data.

What the work covers

  • Research, user journeys and wireframes before visual design
  • High-fidelity interface design and a reusable component library
  • Corporate sites built for speed, search and non-technical editing
  • E-commerce: catalogue, checkout, payment and fulfilment, integrated to ERP
  • Customer, dealer and partner portals with role-based permissions
  • Ongoing updates, backups, security patching and uptime monitoring

What you get at handover

  • Wireframes and a high-fidelity design system
  • Deployed site or portal with role-based access
  • Component library and design tokens
  • Editor training so content changes do not need a developer
  • Maintenance schedule with monitoring and backups

Typically involves

Design tokens Analytics
Discuss this practice
Services in this practice

Every Web & digital service

Web design & development

UX & UI design

Research, journeys, wireframes and a high-fidelity interface design before anything is built.

Open service page → Web design & development

Corporate website design & development

Marketing sites built for speed, search and editing by non-technical staff.

Open service page → Web design & development

E-commerce development

Catalogue, checkout, payment and fulfilment, integrated back to ERP and inventory.

Open service page → Web design & development

Web portals & dashboards

Customer, dealer and partner portals over your enterprise data, with permissions that hold.

Open service page → Web design & development

Design systems & brand application

One component library and token set so every screen looks like the same company.

Open service page → Web design & development

Website maintenance & support

Updates, backups, security patching, uptime monitoring and content changes on request.

Open service page →
01

Three different kinds of project that look identical in a brief

The word website covers at least three separate undertakings, and briefs rarely distinguish between them. A marketing site is a content and performance problem. A transactional site is an inventory, payment and fulfilment problem wearing a design. A permissioned portal is an identity and authorisation problem with a page attached. They differ in team composition, testing effort, running cost and risk, and quoting all three at the same rate guarantees that one of them is done badly.

So the first conversation is about audience and data rather than pages. Who is this for, what will they try to do, and which system holds the information that answers them. A public visitor and a signed in dealer are different projects even when they share a header and a colour palette. Once those questions are answered the page count follows almost mechanically, and the estimate stops being a negotiation about design ambition. Answer those questions in the wrong order and the design work starts against a brief that is certain to change.

Content is the schedule risk on most of this work and it is almost never in the plan. Copy has to be written, approved, translated where relevant and legally reviewed where it makes a claim. Photography has to be arranged. Product data has to be assembled from wherever it currently lives. Design and build proceed in parallel with all of that, but launch cannot, so content ownership is assigned with dates in the first week rather than raised anxiously in the last fortnight.

  • Marketing site, transactional site and permissioned portal scoped and priced separately
  • Audience and system of record established before any page count is discussed
  • Content, imagery and product data assigned to named owners with dates in week one
  • Approval and legal review steps built into the schedule rather than discovered late
  • Translation and locale requirements confirmed before the content model is designed
02

Decisions taken before design that are expensive to reverse

Information architecture and address structure are the foundations, and both become public the moment the site is. External links, printed material, search engine indexes and other systems all come to depend on an address. Changing it later is possible with redirects, and redirects are a maintenance burden that grows and is never removed. Decide the structure once, with room for the sections the organisation expects to add, rather than mirroring an organisation chart which will change before the site does.

The content model is the second foundation and the one clients see least. Whether a case study is a page or a structured record with fields determines whether it can be listed, filtered, reused elsewhere and syndicated later. Modelling everything as free form pages is quick at launch and produces a site that cannot be reorganised. Modelling too rigidly frustrates the editors. That balance is settled with the people who will maintain the content, not only with those commissioning the project.

Accessibility is a build requirement rather than a later audit item, and treating it that way costs very little. Colour contrast, keyboard operation, focus order, form labelling and alternative text are decisions made in design and then enforced in components. We build to WCAG 2.1 AA as a working standard. Retrofitting it means revisiting the design system, the templates and the content at once, which is several times the effort and always lands under time pressure.

  • Address structure and information architecture agreed before templates are designed
  • A content model built with the editors who will maintain it, not only the commissioners
  • WCAG 2.1 AA treated as a build requirement and enforced in the component library
  • A deliberate redirect plan whenever an existing site is being replaced
  • Analytics and measurement defined before launch, so a baseline exists to compare against
01

What a web development company in Karachi charges

Published market pricing is easier to find for web work than for anything else we do, because agencies here advertise packages openly. Typical market rates in Pakistan for a business website run PKR 80,000 to 200,000. E-commerce sits higher, commonly PKR 120,000 to 500,000 and upwards once payment, fulfilment and stock integration are in scope. A custom web application, meaning accounts, roles and business logic rather than pages, is published at PKR 200,000 to 1,000,000 and above. Those are market ranges. The figure that matters to you follows discovery.

Hourly billing tells the same story from another direction. Junior developers in this market are quoted at PKR 500 to 1,000 an hour, a full stack developer at PKR 3,500 to 8,000, and a senior specialist at the top of that band. Work billed internationally is usually priced in dollars, at USD 15 to 50 an hour, with premium agencies reaching USD 40 to 80. Pakistani rates sit roughly 60 to 80 percent below Western equivalents, which is a large part of why this work is bought here at all.

Several things move a quotation far more than page count does. Integration is the biggest of them: a catalogue that reads stock and price from an ERP is a different build to one where somebody updates a spreadsheet on Fridays. Roles and permissions come next, because each additional class of user multiplies the testing rather than adding to it. Content is third, since copy has to be written, sometimes translated, and approved by whoever is accountable for a claim. Replacing a site that has accumulated pages since 2014 costs more than launching on a domain with no history, and the difference is redirect work nobody enjoys quoting.

Design is the part clients expect to dominate the number, and it rarely does. We price after a scoping conversation and we write the exclusions down with the same care as the inclusions, so the proposal can be compared line by line against another one.

  • Business site, e-commerce and custom application priced as three different kinds of work
  • Integration to ERP, inventory or payment moves the number more than page count
  • Every additional user role multiplies testing effort rather than adding to it
  • Content writing, translation and approval budgeted as work with an owner and a date
  • Replacing an existing site priced separately, because redirects are real effort
02

How long a website build takes

Publicly reported delivery timelines in Pakistan cluster into two bands. Six to twelve weeks covers a focused single scope go live: a marketing site with an agreed page set, or a catalogue on a platform that already exists. Three to six months is the honest band once integration, several user roles or a migration from a long lived site are involved. Any web development company in Karachi promising a fortnight is selling a template with your logo applied, which is occasionally the correct purchase and should be described as such.

Content decides the date more often than engineering does. On the majority of the sites we have delivered, the build was finished and waiting while copy went round a third approval loop, product photography was rebooked, or somebody hunted for the specification sheets that were supposed to sit behind forty product pages. Design and build genuinely can run in parallel with content production. Launch cannot.

Approval chains are the second cause of slippage, and they are predictable enough to plan around. A claim about a product may need sign off from legal, a price may need it from finance, and a photograph of a plant may need it from the site manager. Each is a queue with its own working week, and we ask in the first meeting who holds it.

So the schedule names content owners and dates alongside the technical milestones, and states plainly what slips when a deadline is missed. A build that waits three weeks for copy cannot then compress three weeks of testing.

  • Six to twelve weeks reported for a focused single scope go live in this market
  • Three to six months once integration, roles or a migration are in scope
  • Content, imagery and product data assigned to named owners in the first week
  • Legal, finance and site level approvals treated as scheduled queues
  • Testing time protected rather than absorbed when content arrives late
03

Custom build, WordPress or a page builder

Most organisations asking us for a website should be on WordPress, and a web development company in Karachi that never says so is selling its own capacity. It runs an enormous share of the web, the editing experience is familiar to staff who have used it elsewhere, and there is a plugin for most things a marketing site needs. The costs are real and worth stating: plugins are third party code with third party security records, updates arrive constantly, and a site assembled from twenty of them becomes a maintenance commitment rather than an asset. WooCommerce is capable, and it wants a properly sized server once the catalogue and the traffic grow.

Page builders sit a level below that. Elementor on WordPress, or a hosted product such as Wix or Squarespace, will get a small business online quickly and cheaply, and for a five page brochure site with one contact form that is a sensible outcome rather than a compromise. Where they struggle is repeatable structure. Fifty case studies built as free form pages cannot later be filtered, listed by industry or pushed into another channel, because none of the information is in fields. They also tend to carry more markup than the page needs, which shows up in performance measurements later.

Custom development earns its cost in three situations. The process itself is a differentiator and no platform models it. The site is really an application: authenticated users, permissions, calculations, workflow. Or it must read and write to systems of record continuously, in which case the integration layer is the project and the pages are the visible part. Our own portal work is almost entirely this third case, and it is priced as software rather than as a website.

Nothing prevents a sensible combination. A WordPress marketing site in front of a custom portal behind a login is a common arrangement, and it lets the marketing team publish without a developer while the transactional part stays under proper release control. We talk clients out of custom builds regularly, because a configured platform that covers most of the requirement is usually better economics than building the remainder from nothing.

  • WordPress suits most marketing and content sites, with plugin count kept deliberately low
  • Page builders fit small brochure sites and struggle with structured, repeatable content
  • Custom development justified by authentication, workflow or continuous integration
  • A WordPress front with a custom portal behind a login is a common, sane split
  • We advise against a custom build where a configured platform covers the requirement
04

Accessibility, performance and relaunch risk

Accessibility is a build decision and a cheap one if taken early. We work to WCAG 2.1 AA, which in practice means colour contrast that survives a projector, every control reachable and operable from the keyboard, a focus order that follows the visible layout, form fields with labels a screen reader can announce, and alternative text written by somebody who knows what the image shows. Pakistan does not impose an accessibility standard on private companies, so the requirement usually arrives through a parent company, a public sector tender or an overseas customer, by which point the site exists. Retrofitting reopens the design system, the templates and the content together.

Performance we measure rather than assert. Google publishes Core Web Vitals as three named metrics: Largest Contentful Paint for how quickly the main content appears, Interaction to Next Paint for how quickly the page responds when somebody taps, and Cumulative Layout Shift for how much the page moves while loading. We report field data from your own visitors on real Pakistani connections, rather than a laboratory figure from a machine in another country. The common causes are dull and fixable: uncompressed hero images, fonts blocking the render, and a stack of marketing tags loading before anything the visitor came for.

Relaunches carry a specific risk that has nothing to do with design. Every address on the current site is an asset, referenced by search engines, printed material, old emails and other people's links. Before anything is replaced we take an inventory of live URLs, map each to its destination, implement permanent redirects rather than dropping visitors on a home page, and keep the heading and title structure of pages that already perform. After launch we watch coverage and crawl errors for several weeks, because that is when a missed pattern shows itself.

One promise nobody can make honestly is a ranking. Position is decided by a third party using signals it changes continuously, and any supplier guaranteeing placement is describing paid advertising. We build the technical foundations, preserve what an existing site has earned, and stop there.

  • WCAG 2.1 AA applied in the component library rather than audited afterwards
  • Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift measured on your pages
  • Field data preferred over a laboratory score
  • A URL inventory and permanent redirect map produced before any relaunch
  • Technical foundations built, with no guarantee offered on ranking position
05

Hosting, maintenance and the cost of keeping a site live

Hosting choices get easier once you accept they are mostly about who takes the pager. Shared hosting is inexpensive and fine for a brochure site, and you inherit whatever your neighbours on the machine do to it. A virtual server gives you control and a patching obligation with it. Managed WordPress hosting costs more per month and removes most of the work, which for a marketing team with no engineer is usually the right trade. Keeping a site on your own hardware makes sense mainly when it must sit inside the network to reach internal systems, and somebody then owns the power, the link and the renewals.

Maintenance is where sites are lost. Almost every compromise we have been called into began with a known vulnerability, patched months earlier, on a site where updates were applied whenever somebody remembered. A working arrangement is a schedule: updates staged before production, backups with restores that have been tested, uptime checks that request a page touching the database, not a static file, and a named owner for domain and certificate renewal.

A maintenance retainer from a web development company in Karachi is priced from the hourly bands quoted earlier, so a marketing site needs a few hours a month and an integrated portal considerably more. Budget it alongside the build. Where an organisation will not fund maintenance, the honest advice is a platform with fewer moving parts and the limits that come with it.

  • Shared hosting, virtual server, managed platform or your own hardware, chosen by who maintains it
  • Updates applied on a schedule and staged before production, with a way back
  • Restores tested rather than assumed, and monitoring that exercises the database
  • Domain, registrar, hosting and analytics accounts registered to you
  • Maintenance budgeted alongside the build and priced from published hourly rates
How we deliver

Delivering Web & digital

Nothing is drawn until we know what the existing site has already earned. The six steps below start with an audit and end with a maintenance schedule, because that is where sites are actually lost.

  1. 01

    Discover

    Every existing URL is crawled and matched against analytics, so we know which pages earn traffic and which have never been read. Content owners are named in the same week, with dates attached.

  2. 02

    Blueprint

    Address structure, the content model and the authorisation rules for any signed in area come first. Wireframes follow, and the redirect map from old URLs to new is drafted before a template is designed.

  3. 03

    Build

    Components are built once and reused, to WCAG 2.1 AA, with content areas that an editor can change without a developer. Portal screens are wired to the source system, not to a copied database.

  4. 04

    Test

    Keyboard navigation, screen reader order, form labelling and contrast are checked against the standard, not assumed. Checkout is tested with a real payment provider in test mode, including a declined card.

  5. 05

    Go live

    Redirects go live with the site, and we watch server logs and search console for the ones we missed. Certificate, domain and analytics property are checked as a list, in your accounts.

  6. 06

    Run

    Framework and plugin updates go on a schedule, staged before production. Uptime monitoring requests a page that exercises the database, because a site can answer and still be broken where it counts.

Working together

A site is only finished when somebody else can run it

Handover in web work has a simple test. Can the person who owns the content publish a change, correctly, without asking anyone. If they can, the site stays current and the investment keeps returning. If they cannot, it decays quietly, and within a year the newest item on it is an advertisement for a role that was filled some time ago.

That is why editor training, a sane content model and written documentation matter more than any visual flourish. Design attracts attention at launch. Maintainability decides whether the site still represents the organisation two years later, which is the period over which it was actually paid for.

Design, build, integration and maintenance all sit in this practice, and we hand over cleanly when that is the right arrangement. Where a redesign would discard content structure and search visibility that already work, we will say so, and propose the smaller piece of work that fixes the problem you actually have.

Credentials

Accreditations behind Web & digital

A portal is only as good as the system behind it, so these credentials describe what our web work reads from and runs on.

Oracle

Partner

Portals and dealer dashboards read order status, invoices and statements from the Oracle databases behind your ERP, through read only views and an integration layer rather than a nightly copy.

Microsoft

Partner

Entra ID gives partner and dealer portals a sign in that a customer administrator can revoke. Azure hosts the site, and SQL Server frequently holds the catalogue behind an e-commerce build.

Google

Partner

Analytics and Search Console are configured before launch so a baseline exists to compare against, and Google Cloud hosts the site where a specific region or scale is required.

FBR digital invoicing

Compliant integrations

An online checkout that raises a sales tax invoice has to report it. The order confirmation carries the invoice reference number and QR code, and the customer can download the invoice afterwards.

HIPAA

Compliant practices

Patient portals and appointment booking need encryption in transit, session handling that logs a shared terminal out, restricted logging so health data stays out of it, and a business associate agreement.

Client words

What Web & digital clients say

Comments from people who run web & digital systems day to day.

  • They wrote our requirement documentation knowing it had to survive a tender committee, and they were direct when one of our requirements could only be met by a single supplier. We would not have caught that ourselves. The audit trail design has since been through a full review without a finding.
    IT Director Public sector authority
  • Our first concern with FBR integration was simple: what happens to the tills when the line drops. They built the queueing and retry before anything else and demonstrated it by pulling the connection in front of us. Trading carried on, and the invoices went up when the link came back.
    Operations Manager Retail chain, Pakistan
  • Every vendor we spoke to said they could handle style, colour and size. This team asked to see our order book first, then told us which of the shortlisted platforms would need thousands of item codes to do it. That one piece of advice probably saved us a year.
    General Manager Textile exporter
Questions

Web & digital: the questions we are asked

Typical market rates in Pakistan run PKR 80,000 to 200,000 for a business website, PKR 120,000 to 500,000 and upwards for e-commerce, and PKR 200,000 to 1,000,000 or more for a custom web application. Hourly, a full stack developer is quoted at PKR 3,500 to 8,000. Those are market ranges rather than our quotations, and we price a specific scope after a discovery conversation.

Publicly reported timelines in this market run six to twelve weeks for a focused single scope go live, and three to six months once integration, multiple user roles or a migration are involved. The variable that moves the date most is content. Copy, product data and photography have to be written, gathered and approved, so we assign owners and deadlines for those in the first week.

Usually yes to build, and not always cheaper to own. WordPress carries a plugin update and security obligation that never ends, and a site assembled from twenty plugins is a standing maintenance commitment. Custom development costs more at the start and makes sense when the site is really an application, with authentication, workflow or continuous integration to a system of record.

Yes. We are a web development company in Karachi and deliver for organisations in Lahore, Islamabad and outside Pakistan, with discovery workshops run on site or remotely depending on distance and on how much process walking is needed. Portal and integration work generally warrants at least one visit, because seeing how staff actually use the source system changes the design more than a call does.

You do. The domain, registrar account, hosting agreement and analytics property are registered to your organisation with us granted access, and source code is handed over with a deployment guide. That occasionally costs a day at the start of a project while accounts are created in the right name, and it removes an entire category of dispute later.

It can, and that is a planning failure rather than an inevitability. Before anything is replaced we inventory every live address, map each to a destination, implement permanent redirects and preserve the heading structure of pages that already perform. Coverage and crawl errors are then monitored for several weeks after launch, because that is when a missed pattern becomes visible.

Yes, and integration is normally the reason the project exists. Catalogue, checkout, payment and fulfilment are connected back to the ERP or inventory system so stock and pricing are maintained once rather than twice. Your merchant agreement stays between you and your payment provider, and the requirements attached to handling card data follow from that contract.

Updates and security patching on a schedule, backups with tested restores, uptime monitoring that exercises the database, certificate and domain renewal, and content changes on request. It is priced from the published hourly bands, so a marketing site needs a few hours a month and an integrated portal needs more. Deferred patching is how sites get compromised.

Need a site, or a portal over your systems?

Tell us who the audience is and which system holds the data. That determines most of the design decisions.

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