At Sites By Design we deal with clients looking for web design in Sydney and the rest of Australia. We already have websites dominating places like The Southern parts of Sydney, those bring us in a steady amount of business, we even have an office located in Miranda as well as one in the Sydney SBD.
Since writing this blog the industry has changed a lot. WordPress has become the default CMS and is a powerhouse for web design.
Scott Nailon – 2018
There are quite a few people doing web design in the Sydney, as a result you will get varied pricing on websites from them all! Let me show you the differences between different products and leave the decision to you to make.
The Web Design Cowboy
The cowboy is sometimes hard to spot. They will offer you a price between $100 and $2500 for a website, it will most likely be built on a blog platform, and they may then have the audacity to charge you over $10,000 for a website!
Beware of these people! The cowboy will most likely operate from his home office, and can easily pack up and move on to an employed position when times get tough. Although you have been offered a great initial price, you are unlikely to secure a relationship with someone who will look after your needs for the long term.
The eMarketing Genius
This guy (Not Frank Kern there int he photo) comes along full of great ideas that you may not have ever heard before, ideas that sound very convincing and make him seem to be worth a heap of money! Beware, the odds are he has been to a bunch of seminars by people who come up with good ideas and know how to sell them – these ideas need to have been tested very stringently on the market you are in before they are let fly – if they fail you have just paid a fortune for a flop!
In this case you should ask for proof these ideas have worked for his actual clients and some contact details for those who can varify the success first hand.
The ‘Custom CMS’ guy
This guy will talk to you about the special ‘Custom content management system’ they have which is ‘better then anything else on the market!’.
Hold on a second… if this is someone else’s proprietary code then you are stuck with them – which means that if the relationship breaks down or they end up being a poor service company – you are stuck either putting up with it how it is or going elsewhere and building a whole new site!
The other thing is that a CMS needs to be updated continuously in order to keep it working to the latest standards and secure, this makes you what’s called a ‘Beta Tester’ you are paying someone to test their system out and give them feed back which will make it a complete system!
So, what should you be looking for in a web design company when you make your decision?
Firstly, ask them about their team!
Do they have a specialized graphic designer? If so lets see the designers portfolio. There are a lot of kids out there who have learnt to use a graphic design program – but couldn’t design their way out of a wet paper bag – let alone match a colour pallet correctly. Be careful you do end up trusting your work to one of those – it will however become apparent rather quickly if this happens.
Secondly, choose an OPENSOURCE Content management system
Yes, sure if WordPress is all you need then ensure you employ the right company to implement your website!
WordPress can be used for simple business websites and is great for search engines and simple use. How ever the more plugins you stack upon one another the more unstable and insecure it becomes. You need to be able to trust the person you are dealing with in regards to your CMS.
While your at it check out ‘Joomla!’ as well, Joomla! is the name of the largest Open Source Content Management System in the world, it is the big brother of WordPress and is a lot more configurable if you get it done correctly.
Joomla is used by some of the larger entities in the world and has quite a large following, if you employ someone who deals with Joomla you will have a website which can be moved form that person to another if you become un happy with their service, as a result they will have to stay on their toes and keep a good relationship with you.
Thirdly and still just as importantly, ensure they will look after your website hosting!
Website hosting is very important, if your web guy hosts your site outside of Australia you will have slower loading times and possible downtime without anyone to call about it.
Ensure they own and run their own cPanel servers; cPanel is a powerful script which allows for things to be done quickly and easily – without too much technical knowledge. Also ask what the ratio of users per server is so that you are not being crammed onto the server with other businesses or hobby sites like sardines in a can!
Finally, ensure that it is a company who has systems in place.
Systems in business are essential to success, especially when the business takes on over 100 clients.
A web business without systems becomes a headache to run, I learnt this the hard way, and a web guy who doesn’t have systems ends up bogged down in work and takes forever to get back to his clients or complete simple tasks.
To conclude, make sure you check carefully who you are paying to ensure you get the best online presence you can for your venture, check their testimonials by calling a few and making sure they are still happy with their service.
At Sites By Design we offer something that goes over and above Web Design in Sydney, we use Joomla or WordPress and we host it ourselves! Come have a coffee with us and lets chat about what you want to do!
Happy website hunting!