Web Design — A clear view
Read the original article here.
Having a website for a local business now days is one of the most important elements of a business. Having somewhere for your customers to go to read about you, your business and what you do in the beginning.
It’s not as simple as throwing together a pretty landing page and hoping the customers come. It’s a well throughout design coded to perfection and potentially the first experience your customers have with your brand.
With 300,000 Local Sunshine Coast residence and tens of thousands of businesses. You’re competing against your direct competition as the brand of choice.
If you’re a local business and don’t already have a website, you’re not alone.
“50% of small businesses don’t have a website with a large part having no online presence. 60% of small business owners say they don’t have time to launch a website”
Whilst 62% of Australians will stop considering a business if they can’t find information about it online. 83% of customers say search is important when finding or considering a business.
To not be online, to not have a website will find you struggling for trust, and acceptance against fierce competition.
Here is your opportunity to use the Sunshine Coast Web Design agency of choice.
Give yourself 30 minutes to read everything within this page. Our team cares more about you succeeding than we do about you choosing to use us.
If all you take from this is the information, at least we know you’ll be armed with the facts, insight, and knowledge you’ll need to find success.
Planning
Planning your new website is the very first step, you don’t go to the grocery store without a list. Just like you shouldn’t build a website without a plan.
Understanding the fundamentals. Your business goals and aspirations, as well as your point of difference, is just the beginning.
A thorough analysis of your industry, market research and competition helps us determine where the low hanging fruit lies. How they are operating their sites, and who is managing them can help us better target your perfect demographic.
Thousands of visitors coming to your website every week sounds great. But the truth is traffic means nothing. Without a proper conversion rate specialist optimising for conversions, the traffic is pointless.
The ultimate goal for your website is to generate leads or sales. The planning of your new business website is where we show you how we turn tire-kickers into money.
Hosting / Domains
Choosing the right hosting is important, just as important as choosing the right domain name.
Determining your target demographic will assist us in working out your hosting. If your demographic is local to Maroochydore or Caloundra than you would choose to host in Sydney.
If your client base is in Melbourne or Adelaide you might choose something more local. The further your hosting is from your desired traffic the slower the site is.
Choosing cheap hosting is the best way to get a server smack bang in the middle of America. This causes time delays in connectivity between your local traffic and your website. This leads to abandonment or otherwise known as “bouncing”.
Your website’s performance is a key component of high conversions. By using Australian hardwareyou’re giving yourself a competitive edge over the cheap and nasty options available. It’s likely that your competition is an American host to save a couple of dollars.
Once your demographic is determined you’ll want to choose the perfect domain name that represents your business.
The obvious choice here is a .com.au TLD (Top-Level Domain) an Australian domain name. These require a valid ABN (Australian Business Number) and a close enough match between the domain name itself, and your registered business name.
This is a requirement to purchase a restricted TLD such as the .com.au.
Working with our team to discover available domain names to build your brand around, that is fitting and accurate can help not only boost brand exposure and continuity but also help with ranking later.
Branding & Design — Logo Design
If you haven’t already thought about your business branding now is the time. We offer a full-service package which includes your branding, logo design, social media templates, business cards and more.
Believe it or not, there is a lot more to branding than what meets the eye. Psychology plays a large part in digital marketing and branding. It’s important to follow guidelines like colours and styles in order to stand out.
Our team of skilled and respected graphic designers can assist in creating a brand anyone can get behind focused around your audience and niche.
Copywriting
Sunshine Coast websites need to be well written, informative. Yet capturing the attention of a potential prospect.
It’s recommended that a professional copywriter is used to create compelling creative content throughout your brand new website. A well-written copy will add trust and value to your potential clients.
Online Marketing is so much more than beautiful graphics, and stunning pictures. Capturing the lead or sale can be as simple as a minor spelling mistake or them going elsewhere.
sitecentre use a third party creative writing team based right here on the coast who we back 100% to create captivating content. Better yet, we don’t markup their invoice. You pay them, we handle everything else to save you time, and money.
Timeframe
I bet you’re wondering how long is this going to take, time equals money!
We understand you’re excited about your business and want something up as soon as possible. We have good news for you! Our web design package takes less than 2 weeks from planning, creative, design, development, proofing, and launch.
That being said though, timeframes can vary. If you’re a small business looking to get online and have basic requirements then this could be as little as a week. On the other hand, a business looking to completely overhaul their existing site with hundreds of pages can bloat the timeframe out to 1–2 months.
This is always discussed within our planning and we’re always happy to provide accurate deadlines.
Design
Website designs and templates are easy to find online. There are millions of websites with beautiful graphics, but there is only so many designed around your industry or niche.
Sites like Theme Forest and Template Monster are great, it’s where most of the “Sunshine Coast Web Designers” go.
Find a template that looks nice, has the elements you’re looking for. Pay the $45, adjust the colours and logo and voilà — It’s payday!
Unfortunately, this is how your business ends up looking the same as 1,000, if not 10,000 others.
sitecentre do things differently, we don’t download or buy themes, we design and build every site unique specific to your business needs.
We make less money doing it this way, but you get the results you’re looking for.
Before going with any designer make sure they’re knowledgeable with:
- Conversion Rate Optimisation
- Site Performance
- HTML5, CSS3, JS & PHP
- Mobile-First Indexing & Design
- SEO Optimised Page Layouts
If they stall on any of the above, they’re likely a theme designer. Altering colours, logos, and text to build what you’re paying hard-earned money on.
Keep in mind, a custom design through us won’t cost you any more than someone buying a theme. It’s one of the advantages of working with sitecentre.
UX/UI / Easy Navigation
UI (User Interface) and UX (User Experience) in design is important and has major importance in creating the perfect web design.
When creating a website, you need to consider the basics. Whilst testing every element to make sure that you’re getting the absolute most out of your audience.
Creating navigation which is easy to find, easy to navigate and encourage customers to make engagement as intended.
sitecentre goes a step above creating useful navigation. We A/B test the most important elements. Using technology by Google Optimise allowing split testing to better determine placements, colours, and design elements.
We take things a step further by recording user engagement using heat mapping and screen recording technologies. This helps understand how potential customers are engaging with your site.
By doing this we’re able to optimise design elements to help make higher conversions for your local business.
CTA / CRO
CTA (Call-to-action) and CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) is the art of improving the placements of key call-to-action elements. Things like buttons, phone numbers and buy buttons top drive action.
It’s important to ensure customers are converting. Using heat mapping, recording and A/B testing will help us help you generate higher conversion rates than your competition. Capturing more leads and sales than ever known possible.
Web Development
Once done and we have an amazing design, ready for development we dive right into creating code. Our highly optimised framework coded by hand is used for better performance and act as a strong framework optimised for SEO.
We publish our framework for free, for other developers to contribute, use and help grow. What we know is the best Search Engine Optimised PHP/HTML5 framework available.
Our team of high-skilled, multi-talented developers are quick, efficient and across the entire webspace. We dedicate 3 hours per week to learning new skills, attending all major conferences and passionate about being at the cusp of innovation.
Our On-Page SEO strategies work no matter the industry. The type of business or website, or your annual turn over. We optimise your websites code and structure to give you the best chance online.
Wordpress
Everyone knows about WordPress, It’s an absolute powerhouse CMS (Content Management System) used online.
“WordPress Powers 32% of the internet including E-Commerce, Corporate, Blogs, and Informational sites.”
Most Sunshine Coast Web Design agencies use WordPess, like most designers.
The most common reason you’ll more than likely be pushed towards a WordPress powered website is due to it’s higher margins from a development standpoint.
A WordPress site can be launched within 5 minutes, a theme installed, colours changed and a logo uploaded within 30 minutes. The next 2–3 hours spent uploading content and it’s ready for customer approval.
A custom coded website takes 30–50 hours by a skilled developer.
The problem with WordPress and why we don’t use it. It’s great for some, horrible for most. Having 20,000 features, 15 plugins, and giving customers the ability to modify everything.
How often do you change your website? Once a week — most likely not? Once a month — maybe? Once a year — Most likely. Because of this, we offer free changes. If you need something changed, just ask. It’s free.
We tend to not want anyone touching things if something goes wrong. It’s now expensive to fix, your website can, and will go down if you make a mistake. We now need to identify what and run the very real possibility that it is unrecoverable.
Not only this, but 15 plugins means that you’re relying on all 15 to work seamlessly together. 1 publisher pushed an update which pushes an error out, your site can go down.
WordPress is a fantastic platform, but for 99% of small businesses, it’s the wrong choice. You’ll pay more for it, for features you won’t use, it won’t load as fast and changes cost more.
If you’re convinced you to want a WordPress site, don’t pay thousands for it. We will install the CMS, install a template of your choice and show you videos on how to do it yourself. We won’t charge you thousands, or hundreds.
We will do this for free — Because we know, it won’t get results, and when it doesn’t you’ll be here to help.
Mobile Responsive
If your website isn’t mobile responsive, it will not rank. A massive 48% of all web traffic is mobile and growing year on year.
“Starting July 1, 2019, mobile-first indexing is enabled by default for all new websites (new to the web or previously unknown to Google Search).”
This means, if your mobile version of your website isn’t as good as the desktop version, you will not rank and your SEO will decrease.
Having a well optimised, functional mobile user experience is key to succeeding in the new digital age.
We ensure your website is as fast, beautiful and informative on mobile, as it is on the desktop version to ensure you get the most value.
Ecommerce
Running an e-commerce business or looking to move into a new business venture online? Fantastic!
We have the team to help create a stunning user experience. Create a digital marketing strategy that will help skyrocket your new online store to success.
Our team is fluent in Magento, Shopify and Neto code. Our team of designers will work closely with you to pinpoint your target market, demographic and design to increase your conversion rates.
“E-commerce retail sales are expected to account for 13.7% of global retail sales in 2019.”
Creating engaging images, a clear sales funnel, remarketing and EDM (Electronic Direct Mail) campaigns will keep your sales growing month over month.
Website Speed / Performance
Your website speed is vital to your success online. Whether an online e-commerce business or local Sunshine Coast based business performance and site speed can make or break the user experience.
Creating tension between the user and your business website can result in abandonment, loss of trust, and thus revenue.
“Web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds.”
To put site speed into perspective if your online business makes 100,000/day, a 1-second delay causes 2.5 million in lost revenue yearly. Having a 1-second delay cost Amazon 1.6 billion each year.
Creating fast and responsive websites not only impacts leads, and revenue. But your SEO also decreases with website speed being a ranking factor in Google’s Search Engine.
“Our websites will be faster than your competitor’s website, or you will not be charged for our work.”
We’re so confident in our developer’s work that we guarantee site performance. We guarantee your site is faster than your competitors or we won’t charge you a single cent.
Marketing
Now your website is online, it’s time to get traffic, unfortunately, it’s not 2010 where launching a website resulted in near-instant traffic. Technology has become so advanced now that you need to earn your way to the top.
Google, Bing, Facebook, and Yahoo all use advanced AI or Machine Learning technologies to make educated decisions based on calculations, averages, and performance.
Not only do you need to work to get found, but it doesn’t happen overnight either.
Whether you’re focusing on B2B, or B2C, online or offline marketing creating a marketing plan with a step-by-step guide to success can help you grow as fast as possible and see the best results.
Although we offer a full-service solution and provide you with these services, we also have nothing to hide. We provide a free guide you can follow yourself to succeeding in any industry.
This is complementary with all our web design and development builds.
We care about you succeeding, most small businesses cannot afford to have ongoing marketing services provided to them. That shouldn’t hold you back from creating success.
SEO & PPC (Google Ads)
SEO or (Search Engine Optimisation) is the art of optimising your website to best perform online. To outrank your competition and appear as high as possible online.
Whilst PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is the paid alternative to SEO where you appear in paid advertising spots on Google or Bing networks.
We offer SEO services on the Sunshine Coast and Australia wide providing customers with first position rankings.
Our services are white-hat (Safe) yet effective. Our SEO team is located on the coast and not a whitelabelled service you’ll find other some of the others.
Not everyone can be in the first position, yet our customers have a 90% success rate within 4–6 months. With a 95% success rate within 12 months.
Because of our confidence in our SEO services we’re a results-based agency.
If we don’t provide you with results, you don’t pay. It’s that simple.
sitecentre also offers paid advertising options, having worked with local businesses for years. We also offer PPC to national, international and online-only businesses.
We have our Google Ads, and Bing Ads fine-tuned we know you’ll get great results.
Providing guaranteed ROI on all PPC campaigns. If we don’t provide you with a positive ROI, we won’t charge for our time.
“We manage $200,000 monthly Ad spend across our clients with a monthly return of over 2.2 million.”
Our proof is in the results, we grow, by seeing you grow. If we provide you with unbeatable results, the highest ROI imaginable and exceptional customer service we know you’ll be with us for the long run.
Social Media Integration
Social Media has been around for a long time now, yet only 66% of Australian businesses have a Facebook Page. Only 41% of them manage it.
Social Media management is important, in the same report done by Telstra in 2018 shows that 71% of customers want to contact a business through multiple channels.
For this reason, we make the task of managing businesses social media easier than ever. We create 3 high-quality templates with your brand colours, logos and fonts ready to edit, and upload.
This creates continuity across your channels, knowing how easy it is to manage your social platforms.
Our team will also go into your social media accounts, optimise them for better exposure. We create the best experience for your customers. We do all this, for free.
If you’re looking for someone to help manage your accounts, we have a great relationship with some of the best, and most talented social media experts on the Sunshine Coast we can put you onto.
Software Setup
Your website is live, you have a marketing plan, everything is looking great. But managing success and results is important for future growth.
Setting everything up that’s required for your website is something that we provide on your behalf.
Countless times we have been contracted for marketing, or a redesign and been unable to provide value due to lack of reporting.
It’s become very evident that if the designer doesn’t set it up, it doesn’t get done. That’s why we added it to our standard service.
Setting up the accounts, saving passwords, installing and integrating all the tooling you will need.
We’ll also provide you with the training required to understand the data.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the largest, most widely used and secure way of reporting your traffic, conversions and even sales into an easy to use platform.
With hundreds of settings, different depending on your industry, country, and goals it’s important it’s configured correctly from the start.
Google Ads
Whether you use it now, later or never, having a Google Ads account created with conversions feeding into the account allows you to turn it on when you’re ready with ease.
Ensuring your remarketing data is being fed directly from your website to your advertising account allows you to turn it on, or off whenever you choose.
Gmail / Email hosting
Most businesses use email each and every day, it’s the most widely used form of communication for B2B and B2C online. However, ensuring it’s set up, configured and optimised for security is essential.
Whether you use a platform like Gmail, Office 365 or Outlook we make sure your emails come through to your computer, tablet, and phone seamlessly.
We help set up your signature or email footer, settings and configure your security settings to prevent unauthorised access, as well as setting up your Firewall, and spam filters.
GMB — Google My Business
GMB or Google My Business is Google’s Business Listing Directory designed to connect customers with businesses with ease, using Google Maps, and important business data to make it easier for local searches to find information on your business.
Every single Sunshine Coast web design service we offer we make sure you are found on Google using GMB.
Merchant Centre
If you’re running an online store, or e-commerce business it’s important to set up Google Merchant Centre.
Merchant Centre allows you to send a feed of products, information, and shipping information directly to Google to help identify who you are, what you sell, and validate you’re an authorised and trusted online store.
We will set up the product feed, shipping details, logos and business information Google requires to validate your online business.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a platform designed and developed by Google for Webmasters to track, report and analyse the performance of the website. It also provides errors, manual actions and issues Google may have with your site.
Without it installed, you’re potentially at a loss as to whether your website has errors or not. Google Search Console also provides a way of submitting pages on your site, otherwise known as a sitemap.
Bing Console
Bing Console, Similar to Google Search Console provides you a way of understanding how Bing and Yahoo understand your website, search queries and can help provide insight into your business site through their tools.
Extras
That’s not where our service ends though.
sitecentre is passionate about small business growth, development and thrives from seeing locals succeed.
We extend our professional services well beyond the normal “Web Design Sunshine Coast” standards.
We offer Sunshine Coast business owners the absolute best customer service and value for money web design packages without question.
Our quality is unmatched as far as we’re concerned. Our pricing is by far the most competitive value for money option on the market.
If you’re looking for a business website that meets your every expectation from design and development to results and goals we will not be beaten.
Tech Support
The number 1 complaint we hear from small businesses is they cannot get a hold of their current designer, or web agency.
We invest in our support team to offer 24/7 phone or email support to assist in instant support when you need it most.
Whether you’re trying to set up a new email address, or your entire website is down our local team will be there to fix it as it happens. With fast, reactive and professional guidance and support.
Never again will you need to worry about updating your website or contacting your web company.
Pricing
If you have skipped all the above content in order to work out if we’re affordable or not, we encourage you to take the time to read the above.
We offer far more than the standard agency, we dive far more in-depth, and genuinely care about your results.
Our difference isn’t the lowest price, but making your business grow as fast as humanly possible.
Pricing is a vague, and very difficult thing to publicly show. Every business requires different requirements, provide different services and can vary in price.
Our prices range from $1,200 to — $2,200 for small business websites inclusive of everything mentioned above.
This being said, our web design packages can also extend upwards of $4,000 depending on complexity, strategy, content, and niche.
We’re transparent with our pricing, we provide upfront, obligation-free quotes.
Better yet, if you opt to use another agency, we also help consult free of charge. This will help you get the best results from the agency you choose.
By allowing us to proof designs, speak with the agency you choose and make suggestions. You will get the absolute most out of the web design company you choose.
A service we offer free of charge.