A website should do a job, not just exist.
Most business websites are brochures. They describe the company, sit still, and send the occasional enquiry by accident.
The question we start with is what the site should actually do - book the job, answer the question, take the payment, save your team the phone call - and then design backwards from that.
Clutch 5.0/5 - 15+ years experience - Australia-wide
One site, every screen it lands on.
Most of your visitors are on a phone.
Responsive is not a feature to be quoted separately. It is the baseline, and it means the same page working at every width rather than a shrunken copy of the desktop version.
We design the narrow view first, because that is the one most people will actually see and the one that exposes lazy layout fastest.
A brochure informs. A tool does something.
The difference is whether a visitor can finish what they came to do without ringing you. Booking, quoting, paying, tracking, uploading - each one removed from your team's day.
That is also where a website stops being a cost and starts being infrastructure.
Six things that decide whether a site works.
In roughly the order they matter. The first three are where most sites are lost.
A clear job per page
Every page should have one thing it wants the visitor to do. Pages that try to do five things usually achieve none of them.
The narrow view
Designed first, not squeezed in afterwards. Tap targets big enough to hit, text big enough to read, forms short enough to finish.
Speed
A slow site loses people before they see anything. This is a design decision as much as a technical one - largely a question of how much you load.
Structure and navigation
Somebody arriving cold should find what they need in two clicks. Most site maps are drawn around the org chart rather than the visitor.
Conversion paths
The route from arriving to enquiring, made obvious and short. Usually the cheapest improvement available on an existing site.
Accessibility
Real contrast, keyboard access, sensible headings. It widens who can use the site and is legally expected of many businesses.
What businesses ask about website design.
Do we need a new site, or can ours be improved?
Often it can be improved, and that is usually the better spend. A site with sound structure and a slow, cluttered front end is a fixable problem.
We will tell you which situation you are in before quoting a rebuild.
How long does a website take?
A focused site is usually weeks rather than months. What extends it is almost never the design - it is waiting on content, photography and decisions. We will tell you up front which of those sit with you.
Will we be able to update it ourselves?
Yes, and that is the intent. Text, images and pages should be editable by your team without calling us. Anything that needs a developer to change a sentence has been built wrong.
Can you just make it look better?
We can, but if the site is not producing enquiries, appearance is rarely the reason. We would rather look at the structure and the conversion path first and tell you honestly where the problem is.
What should your website actually do?
Tell us what your team spends time on that a website could handle. That is usually where the useful version of this project starts.