Arusha, Tanzania
Website design and development in Arusha
Timeless International has designed and built websites from Arusha since 2009, for safari operators, lodges, NGOs and businesses across Tanzania and abroad. Here is what we build, what it costs, how long it takes, and how to judge any web designer in town, including us.
By Hamisi A. Mnaro, Founder & CEO, Timeless International ·
Updated
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Timeless International is a web design and development studio in Arusha, Tanzania, working since 2009. Our office is at NSSF Plaza (Kaloleni). We design and build websites, booking platforms and custom software for safari operators, lodges, businesses and NGOs. Package prices start at US$800 for a five-page website delivered in about three weeks.
Who Timeless International is
We are a studio of designers, developers, writers and printers. We have built websites and brands from Arusha since 2009 and have worked with more than 500 clients, from sole traders to large organisations. Six disciplines sit under one roof: AI, web, branding, marketing, design and printing. The same team that designs your homepage can also print your brochures and run your search campaigns.
The people you will deal with:
- Hamisi A. Mnaro, founder and CEO.
- Irene Msaki, who manages content: copy, articles and the way a site explains itself.
- Ziddie Ally, business development.
- Jesca Moshi, head of our printing department, for when the brand has to exist on paper as well as on screen.
More about how we work is on our studio page.
Where to find us in Arusha
Our office is on the Mezzanine Floor of NSSF Plaza (Kaloleni), Plot No. 130–132, Block 21, Arusha. We are open Monday to Saturday, 08:00 to 17:00, and closed on Sunday.
You are welcome to come in, but a quick message first means the right person will be there. WhatsApp or call +255 767 663 909, or email info@craftedbytimeless.com. If you would rather write down what you need first, the project planner takes a few minutes and gives us what we need to come back with a proposal. The contact page reaches the same inbox.
On Google we are listed as a "Website designer". On 15 September 2026 the profile showed a 4.8 rating from six reviews.
Who we build websites for
Most of our web work comes from five kinds of organisation. Each needs something different from a website.
Safari and tour operators
Sites that sell expensive, considered trips to people researching from abroad. They need itineraries, pricing logic, enquiry handling and search visibility in the traveller's own country. See websites and systems for safari operators.
Hotels, lodges and camps
Property sites that have to show a place well and push guests towards a direct booking or enquiry. See websites for hotels, lodges and camps.
Businesses and corporates
Company websites, client portals and internal tools for firms that need to look established and run efficiently. See digital work for corporates and SMEs.
NGOs and impact organisations
Websites that explain a programme clearly to donors, partners and the public, often in more than one language. See websites for NGOs.
Online shops
Stores that take payment in shillings and dollars and fulfil orders reliably. See e-commerce development.
Why a local Arusha team helps, and when it doesn't matter
Working with a studio in the same town has practical advantages. None of them are about loyalty.
- You can sit in the same room. A two-hour workshop over the sitemap and the enquiry flow settles questions that would take two weeks of email.
- East African payments are routine for us. We have built integrations with Pesapal, NMB and M-Pesa. Getting a Tanzanian bank or mobile-money gateway approved and working is often the slowest part of a booking site, and we know the steps.
- Same time zone. If a form breaks at 10am, you are speaking to someone who is also at their desk at 10am.
- We know the tourism calendar. Arusha businesses live by the season. A safari or lodge site should launch before the enquiry peak, not in the middle of it, and its content has to change with the migration and the rains. We plan timelines around that.
- We understand two audiences at once. Many Arusha businesses sell to local customers and international visitors in the same week. The site has to work for both.
To be fair about it: you do not need a local team if your project is simple, your audience is entirely overseas and you already work well over video calls. What matters more than location is the checklist further down this page: live work you can inspect, clear ownership of your domain and hosting, and a plan for your old URLs. We also work fully remotely for clients abroad, and our note on when a local web design company makes sense covers the trade-off in more detail.
The technology we build with
We choose tools for how long a site has to live and who has to maintain it, not for fashion. Our current stack for custom websites and platforms:
- Laravel (PHP) on the server, with MySQL for data.
- React with Inertia for interfaces, styled with Tailwind CSS.
- Cloudflare R2 for photographs and media, so large galleries don't slow the server down.
- Timeless Builder, our own visual page builder. Your team can edit pages with version history and scheduled publishing, without breaking the layout.
- Payment integrations with Pesapal, NMB and M-Pesa.
We also look after existing WordPress sites. If WordPress suits your business and your team already knows it, we will say so rather than push a rebuild.
One principle matters on every build. The server sends finished HTML with the real text of the page in it, so search engines and AI tools can read it without running JavaScript first. On one client site we inherited, the homepage contained zero readable characters before its scripts ran. The details are in the Ecological Adventure case study. Read more about our website development work.
What a website costs in Arusha
Most studios ask you to "contact us for a quote". Here are our published packages in US dollars.
| Package | Price (USD) | Typical timeline | What it is |
|---|
| Dhahabu Explorer | $800 | 3 weeks | A 5-page responsive website with contact form and basic SEO setup. Two revision rounds, one month of support. |
| Mawe Sapphire | $2,000 | 5 weeks | Up to 10 custom-designed pages, brand refinement, content strategy and advanced SEO. Three revision rounds, three months of support. |
| Simba Dynamic | $5,000 | 8 weeks | A 20-page platform with a booking or enquiry system and content management. Four revision rounds, six months of support. |
| Tembo Majestic | $10,000 | 12 weeks | No page limit, a custom web application (dashboards, booking engines, portals), an admin dashboard and API integrations. Twelve months of support. |
| Serengeti Ruby | $20,000 | 16 weeks | Everything in Tembo, plus AI-powered business tools, a custom CRM and multi-platform content. Twenty-four months of support. |
| Uhuru Diamond | Quoted | Scoped | A fully custom scope with a dedicated team, for requirements that don't fit a package. |
The full comparison is on the packages page.
What moves the price up or down
- Records, not pages. Twenty tours typed as pages is cheap to build and expensive to maintain. Twenty tours stored as records you can filter, price and quote from costs more to build and far less to live with.
- Payments. An enquiry form is simple. Deposits, instalments and a gateway that confirms payment back to the site take real engineering.
- Languages. A French or German version needs translated content and correct language markup, not an automatic widget.
- Replacing an old site. Mapping and redirecting old URLs is careful work, and skipping it is the most common way businesses lose their Google rankings.
- Content. If we write the copy and source the photography, the budget has to include that time.
How a project runs, step by step
- Conversation. In person, on WhatsApp or on a call. We need your goals, your audience and what the current site gets wrong.
- Scope and quote. A written scope that says what is and is not included, the price and the timeline.
- Audit, if you have an existing site. Every page, every URL that earns traffic, every plugin and form, and where each will end up.
- Structure and design. Sitemap and page layouts first, visual design second, and your feedback in rounds.
- Build. Development on a private staging address you can click through.
- Content and SEO. Titles, descriptions, headings, image text, structured data and redirects, done as part of the build rather than afterwards.
- Launch. We submit the sitemap to Google, check the redirects and watch the first days of traffic.
- Support. The support months included in your package, then ongoing care if you want it.
How long website development takes
Our package timelines run from three weeks for a five-page site to sixteen weeks for a full platform. In practice, the clock is usually set by the client's side of the work:
- Content. Text and photographs arriving late is the most common cause of delay.
- Decisions. Rounds of feedback go faster when one person has the final say.
- Third parties. Payment gateway approval, domain transfers and access to old hosting all take their own time.
For tourism businesses, count backwards from your busy season and allow a margin. Launching a new site a month before the enquiry peak is far safer than launching during it.
Websites for safari companies
This is the work we know best, because a large part of Arusha's economy is safari tourism. A safari website has to answer a traveller who is months from booking and comparing several operators. What does this trip include? What does it cost in which season? Where will I sleep? Can I trust this company?
The strongest example of that thinking is our rebuild for Gosheni Safaris, a safari operator and DMC. Their site had grown to 484 hand-built WordPress pages. We rebuilt it on Laravel so that 173 tours, 306 lodges and camps, 114 destinations and 126 journal posts became structured records. The new site is available in English, French and German and takes bookings with payment through Pesapal. We kept all 691 legacy URLs working so earned rankings were not thrown away. Homepage HTML fell from 737KB to 156KB, and time to first byte from 5.9 seconds to 1.2 seconds.
At a larger scale, we rebuilt Inspiration Africa's nine safari brands as one Laravel platform, backed by 854 automated tests. We also built and run SafariSync (safarisync.com), our own safari marketplace platform. If your operation needs itinerary, quotation or reservation tools rather than just a website, read about our safari and DMC software. Other safari and hospitality names we have worked with include Embalakai, Baobab Camps & Lodge and Serengeti Luxury Holidays.
Websites for hotels, lodges and camps
A lodge website has two jobs: make someone feel the place, and make the next step obvious. The practical parts matter more than the effects:
- Room and tent pages with honest photographs, sizes and what is included.
- Rates that can be explained by season and residency without a PDF download.
- A booking engine or enquiry form that works on a phone over a slow connection.
- Galleries that load quickly because images are sized properly, not just compressed.
- Location pages that answer "how do I get there?" from Arusha, Kilimanjaro airport or an airstrip.
For properties that want a more editorial, high-end result, see what we mean by premium web development, and our hotel and lodge solutions.
Some projects are not really websites. Customer portals, booking and payment systems, internal dashboards, multi-brand platforms, CRMs: this is software, and we build it as software. That means proper data models, access control and automated tests. The Ecological Wilderness Adventure platform has 80 data models covering bookings with deposits and instalments, NMB payments and the day-to-day operations of a safari and Kilimanjaro operator. It is backed by 737 automated tests. The company can release updates itself, with a backup taken first.
If you have a process that currently lives in spreadsheets and WhatsApp threads, that is usually where a custom platform starts. The Tembo Majestic and Uhuru Diamond packages are the right starting point for that conversation.
Do you provide SEO?
Yes, and it starts during the build, not after launch. Every site we deliver has unique titles and descriptions, a sensible heading structure, a clean XML sitemap, canonical URLs, structured data, fast pages and readable HTML. When we replace an old site, we redirect the old URLs one-to-one.
After launch, SEO is ongoing work: content, local search, technical fixes and reporting. See our SEO service. If you run a tour or safari company, the safari SEO guide explains how travellers search and how a site should be structured to meet them. For paid ads, social media and WhatsApp marketing, see digital marketing in Tanzania.
Hosting, maintenance and support
Every package includes a support period, from one month on Dhahabu Explorer to twenty-four months on Serengeti Ruby. After that you can continue with a maintenance arrangement or take the site in-house.
- Hosting. We can host and manage the site for you. See managed web hosting.
- Maintenance. Updates, security patches, backups and fixes. See website support.
- Ownership. Your domain should be registered in your company's name, and you should hold the login. We will set it up that way even if we manage it for you.
Working with clients outside Tanzania
Yes. Being in Arusha does not limit who we work for. A large share of the people who find our site through Google search from the United States and the United Kingdom, and many of our safari clients sell almost entirely to travellers in Europe and North America. For clients abroad we work over video calls, shared documents and a staging site you can review at any hour. Invoices can be in US dollars.
What we add for an overseas client is local knowledge. We know the parks, the lodges, the season and the payment rails your Tanzanian partners use.
How to compare web designers in Arusha
Whoever you hire, including us, these questions separate a studio that will serve you well from one that won't:
- Ask for live URLs, not screenshots. Open the sites on your phone. Do they load quickly on mobile data? Do the forms work?
- Test the speed yourself. Run a portfolio site through Google's PageSpeed Insights. A studio's own work is the best evidence of its standards.
- Ask who will own the domain and hosting. It should be you. A domain registered to the agency is a common and painful trap.
- If you are replacing a site, ask for the redirect plan. Which old URLs go where? No plan usually means lost rankings.
- Ask what happens after launch. Who fixes a broken form in month four, and what does it cost?
- Ask whether you can edit the site yourself, and ask them to show you how on an existing site.
- Get the scope in writing: pages, features, revision rounds, content responsibilities and the timeline.
We have written a longer guide to choosing a web design agency in Tanzania.
What clients have said
“Working with Timeless International was a game-changer for our business. They created a visually stunning website that perfectly showcased our brand and helped us attract more customers.”
— Hassan Mhimte
“Timeless International understood our requirements and delivered a website that not only looked great but also improved our online sales. We highly recommend their services.”
— Julius Mkodo
For the detail behind the work, including what didn't improve as well as what did, read our case studies. When you're ready, plan your project or send us a WhatsApp message on +255 767 663 909.
Talk to the team that wrote this: NSSF Plaza (Kaloleni), Mezzanine Floor, Plot No. 130–132, Block 21, Arusha.
WhatsApp +255 767 663 909