Web Design & Development

You’ll need a website if you want to promote yourself online. These days, every business is expected to have some kind of website.

Benefits of a Website

A "new business" machine

Your website should operate as a "new business" machine for you. It should be a conveyor belt of new leads dumping new profit into your business.

A successful website would:

Free you from the grind of finding new prospects.
Filter out "tyre-kickers" who don't understand or value what you do.
Allow you to have so much work that you can afford to pick and choose only the jobs you find interesting.
Demonstrate your expertise and reinforce what makes you better than everyone else. Customers will come to you already keen to do business.

Most effective advertising available

Many of our clients gradually abandon other forms of advertising in favour of their website. Their website alone generates enough new business.

Realistically, other advertising like newspaper ads are only seen by prospects for a couple of minutes (even seconds). Your website can be an asset for your business for years.

Even if you decide to do other advertising, the insights gained through the regular analysis of your website can be used to make other advertising more effective.

Communicate with your customers

A website is a cost-effective way to communicate with both existing and potential customers. Colour, multimedia and interactivity can be combined and added at a fraction of the cost of more traditional channels such as newspapers, Yellow Pages and television.

The conversation isn't one-way either. By looking at how customers find you and what they do on your site, you can figure out what your potential customers want.

: Google's increasing traffic. Source alexa.com.

People want to find you online - a website lets them

More and more people are turning to the Internet as a convenient way to find products and services. There are also particular demographics (business to business, young, tertiary educated etc.) that are more likely to search for you online.

A website is rapidly becoming a basic tool of business (like a fax machine used to be). Don't get left behind.

Web Development Process

Planning

We generally begin by identifying your goals for the website. Things that we are looking to learn from you include:

Who are your current customers and how did they find you?
How do you promote yourself currently? What has worked well? What hasn't worked?
Who is your main competitor? What are they doing that we could learn from? What do you do better than your competitors?
What is the performance of the current site (if any)?
What are you looking to achieve with a new website? What features do you want? What would success look like to you?

With a clear idea of your goals, we can achieve the best bang for your buck within your set budget.

Graphic Design

The look of your website is important because first impressions count. Except for our most basic websites, all our sites are custom designed.

Balanced against the visual impact of your site is the need to keep it easy to use. Website visitors do not want to spend time learning how to use your website. We make sure everything is where people expect it to be to allow them to move around your site easily.

The best way to get a sense of what we can do is look at the portfolio.

Content

Website content includes both the words and pictures you use to get your message across on your website.

Online you may only have a few seconds to capture your visitor's interest before they hit the back button and go onto the next site. To make sure your visitors stick around, your site's content must be clear and compelling.

By looking over your current ads and brochures and asking questions, we seek to understand your business. Then we can write content that highlights what makes you unique and better than anyone else out there. As part of the copywriting process, we also research what people are searching for online and make sure those insights are included in your copy.

This dual approach makes sure people will both find your website and stick around to read it.

Build

While the copywriting is being pulled together we'll be building the rest of your website.

All of our websites are built to the defined XHTML and CSS standards.
Your site is built from the ground up to be search engine friendly to get the best possible SEO results.
After the content has been added the website is tested to be make sure it is fully compatible with the most common browsers and versions.
A detailed statistics package (Google Analytics) is set up on your site to make sure you get the best out of your website with ongoing reporting.
Your site will be hosted on a dedicated server based in Sydney at a secured location with generator backup to ensure maximum uptime.

At all stages we work closely with you to make sure you are getting exactly what you want. If, for any reason, you are not satisfied with your website we offer a 100% money back guarantee.

Content Management Software

All of our sites are built on top of Content Management System (CMS) software. A CMS system will let you:

Update your site easily. If you can use a word processor then you have the skills to update your site. Your information can be moved, duplicated, added, deleted, hidden, resized, converted and reorganised quickly online. Menus, vital to a usable website, are automatically updated. Footers and contact information can be quickly updated across the whole website.
A CMS allows your site to be easily upgraded in the future. Additional features to be easily added in the future. A "new look" can be swapped in later without needing to rebuild the site. Additional features such as blogs, shops, news, or anything you can think of can be added in the future. Layouts tailored to particular devices, such as mobile phones or PDAs can be easily added to your site.
Maintain a constant "look". Traditional maintenance of websites can often result in a confused and "broken" website design. A CMS ensures that content added to the site fits the look of the website.

Our CMS of choice is the Typo3 CMS software. TYPO3 is widely used by governments, businesses and organisations globally. It is an enterprise level CMS which means that it suits even the most complex and busy websites.

Typo3 is actively used and improved by thousands of professional web designers and developers globally.

For a complete list of features please see the Typo3 website

Ongoing Support

Once your site is built, it is really only the beginning. After all, it hasn't made you any money yet.

We provide an ongoing service which aims to make your website an effective "new business" machine:

Regular website reports evaluating your website's performance and suggesting improvements
Updates to your website's software and features as they become available.
Making updates to your website's design. This can sometimes be made necessary when new browsers are released.

Not locked in

We do not lock you in with contracts. We only want you to stay if you are completely happy with the service. You are free to leave at any time. We do not use any proprietary software and all files needed to move your website elsewhere (or for backup) will be supplied on request at any time.