In Orlando West, Soweto, a young entrepreneur is building a business around a problem many township entrepreneurs have.
Founded by Matete Magomane in 2025, the Orlando West-based business Framework Studio provides website development and digital services for small businesses seeking to establish professional online presence.
Having a good product is no longer enough if potential customers cannot find you.
A salon may have hundreds of WhatsApp contacts, but if customers search for the business online, there may be little to find.
That is the gap Framework Studio is trying to fill.
Its proposition is simple: help township businesses build a digital shopfront without making the process inaccessible to entrepreneurs operating on tight budgets.
A customer who lives outside the immediate community may not know the business exists.
A website can potentially change that by making the business searchable and giving people outside the entrepreneur’s existing network a way to learn about the company.
“We want to give the small businesses that professional look, even if they are just starting from their back room,” Magomane says.
For small businesses, social media has become one of the easiest ways to promote a product or service.
WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok can help entrepreneurs reach customers without the cost of traditional advertising, but small businesses are encouraged to have a website to avoid scams.
Social media has not eliminated the need for websites. Instead, the two can serve different purposes.
A customer might discover a business on TikTok, see its products on Instagram, and then search for the company before deciding whether to buy.
A website can help that customer find the business’s services, products, photographs, contact details, and location in one place.
” I started this business because I saw a lot of businesses had no website, and I was like, let me target those businesses.”
Recent research suggests there is still a substantial digital gap among South African small businesses.
A July 2026 field study by Watts Digital examined 4,078 owner-run businesses across all nine provinces.
It found that 42.9% had no real website, while 39.7% had no web presence of any kind, meaning no website or social-media presence that a customer could land on.
The gap is also greater outside major metropolitan areas. According to the study, 23.7% of businesses sampled in metros had no website, compared with 44.3% in secondary cities and 59.4% in small towns.
For a business such as Framework Studio, that gap represents potential customers.
Framework Studio is operating within that ecosystem by focusing on one increasingly important asset: digital visibility.
