Which Website Design Company

If you're looking for a web design company or agency for your business, you have many decisions to make. You can't just search for web design in your local area and expect to get a quality professional who knows what they're doing. Your competition wouldn't leave this critical decision to chance using Google to find the best web design company or freelancer in your area for your online presence, and neither should you. 

What website design company provide?

So what does a website design company provide that you find a must for your business besides just pretty pictures and text? A website design company should offer a professional approach to your strategy, analyse your competition, and look at your goals and objectives and how these can be achieved through the proper use of content. 

How to select an experienced website design company?

Still, that's great. I know I need a professional and everyone tells me I'm the best, but how can I honestly tell who the best website design company is? 

It's like anything in life. It comes down to their proven experience in the field and the outcomes they have produced. It's not just about making a pretty website that has won awards for its cutting edge look, feels, and layout. Seek to ask questions from your website design company that proves that they have achieved more than just a website. Most will give you a portfolio of the best work and say, look how great we are? What were the goals these customers started with, and how did their website tool achieve these in detail? What were the outcomes? How were they measurable? Nine times out of ten, the website design company won't answer the questions and give you an excuse about privacy. Remember, they were keen to use these five minutes ago for their portfolio. Proven experience outcomes are the most important when choosing an agency or freelancer.  

Why Choose a Local Website Design Company?

What else would you consider important when choosing a website design company or freelancer? You should consider their locality and if they are local to you. You want to have a long term relationship with this person or company. You want them to be on board with your mission and be as enthusiastic about it as you are. It's not too much to expect that you should be able to source someone from your local community. Believe web design companies from the city, and you'll think nobody is qualified to deliver what they offer but them. Consider if you did choose a local, how much easier would it be to trust them with your online business? What if that local web design company was part of a more extensive network. A network of professionals where a specialist approach was still harnessed. The best designers and developers available throughout regional Australia could be used. You wouldn't have to worry about one web design company or freelancer going awol. You could actually get the job done to the high standard you dreamt of when you first started. 

Other Advantages of Local Website Design Companies

Website Design Companies like those in the RWD network help business owners to focus on their businesses.

Individuals who do not have any web design skills should not tackle web design projects. Instead, they should focus on the core of their businesses. If a professional web designer is hired, the website will be designed professionally.

Website Design Companies save business owners time?

Business owners are trying to figure out how to save money by doing their own website on a DIY builder like Wix or SquareSpace. This wastes the business money and time, probably multiples of time you would pay a qualified web designer is wasted on trying to figure out how to do an amateur job.

Building a local network

These seem pretty simple and possibly not worth the hassle. However, this is one of the most important benefits of choosing a local web design company. The opportunity to build relationships with your community is priceless. 

Web developers work with many different companies. Companies can and will feed off your own products and services. Community is about supporting your neighbour with your time, money and love. 

Web designers, freelancers and agencies are great at referring business between clients. Because RWD is a network of regionally based professionals, your local is as big as Australia without the big city business taking a slice of your cash. We will always try to use someone local to your company for all of the required project specialities. 

The benefit of local support

You can be sure that you will have a higher level of support than a large agency or business from the city or overseas. Locals that know you by name and care about you and your business. Choosing a specialist is still essential, but filling the gap you need to get the outcome your after can be achieved through a network such as RWD while maintaining an excellent local support arrangement.

The benefit of knowledge around the local market

Something can also be said for local knowledge and what a local part of the RWD network has to contribute to the local market. 

Locals know more about the local audience and culture to be able to apply proper styling, wording, and design that captures the attention of the right audience. 

What might appeal to an audience in the city won't always appeal to a country audience.

Imagine a world where you spoke the same language as your local designer or developer.

Well of course, that's far more likely than if you got someone from the internet from India or from the cities, isn't it? 

With more accessible communication comes the advantages of not having language barriers or, worse still, your message is misinterpreted or misrepresented on your website. For example, "I thought you sold funnels, not sold funerals". 

 Additionally, in a life shaped by written words and the importance of accurate communication, many have experienced spelling or grammar mistakes if you asked them to send some content via email. 

Similar situations happen when Communicating with Google through websites. Imagine yourself being able to communicate very simply and easily without needing to correct everybody else, then failing it because your friend, who I will call Matthew, commits so thoroughly that he forgets about his fix for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. 

What is the best way to get a website? Website builder or website design company?

So we've talked about going local, what a web design company should provide, how to choose one and why RWD could be for you if your a business or even if you are a freelancer looking for a web design company to work with. 

Now let's get started with the best way to get a website if you're still sitting on the fence about whether or not you should go with a professional or build it yourself.

 The benefit of a website design company is that you have a full-service Australian based business to go back to if you have problems. However, 9/10 people find they have questions or other things they need help with after a website project is complete, so an established company definitely has its advantages. 

Compare this to a freelancer or even a small team in regional Australia that is stand-alone website designers and developers. This is when RWD can again help provide that specialist approach, stability and continuity you need. Best of all, we're not sending the money or work to India or the city, but you're employing local county or regional Australian professionals.

How can a professional website design company transform your business?

If you're wondering about the website process and the best way to get this here, you should look at our "how it works" page for business. It breaks down our best practice approach to digital marketing with our members, who also agree this is the best option for customers. 

Ok, so again another why and how? What is the point of using a website design company, and how will one transform my business. 

We go back to selecting a good website design company and what one should be doing in the process and providing examples of work that have delivered outcomes for the business. 

If all these things are done correctly, your business can be transformed into the company at the other end of your goals and provide you tangible outcomes. A website isn't just a website. It's a money-making tool, and the sooner it's recognised as what it is, the sooner you can harness the opportunities that this provides.

I'm probably a lot like you in many ways. For years I wanted to leave my daily job working as a government employee, seemingly safe and secure from financial pressures that life in private companies or working for yourself could bring.

You see I worked for an agency in Sydney in early 2000 after finishing a degree in IT in Wagga Wagga. I loved working on websites and being a developer but after a few years we decided to have kids and move back to the country. There's something about bringing up your kids in a regional area that seems safe.

To be honest I wasn't a big fan of living in Sydney although we had lots of great friends and lived in a pretty good area I would have loved to have that same job in country NSW.

Given I was about to become a dad I needed a thought I needed a steady secure job and with some skills in IT I applied for a job in Wagga. It wasn't long and I was back building websites for business as a side hussle.

I was lucky enough to be working with a guy who was a graphic designer and someone that also had a passion for marketing. We did one, then two, then it seemed like they were lining up to get work done. I worked nights and my weekends for years developing websites and managing these from my house. Things took a bit of a turn in 2012 when my business partner decided he was going to start teaching at TAFE. For a while, we weren't doing anywhere near as much as what we had and then in 2014 things started getting serious again before I knew it we had over 100 sites and I was still running on a part-time basis while still doing a full-time job.

Scaling back the FT grind

I'm not saying I did things 100% the right way but in 2016 I decided it was getting a bit too much and took a day a week out to dedicate to my "agency" while my business partner left his secure job at TAFE and went full time on our business.

Things got busy, very busy over the next few years and I even scaled back to three days a week on government job and two days my own business. Still working weekends and holidays meant I was my work-life balance was a little bit out of whack. I was constantly forced into doing things I didn't feel I was very good at but needed to be done because we called ourselves an "agency".

The truth was we were stretching ourselves far too thin and trying to wave the "full service" flag against some of our competitors that were doing the same. When your in regional australia your keen for work and often willing to take whatever you can get.

The start of RWD

In 2018 I contacted a designer in Orange to pay her to do logo and style work for a new business idea I had. Tiffany was her name and she went through a full process as a graphic designer to produce some quality results. Back then I was going to launch a Drupal-based regional marketing agency focused on regional results for customers' businesses. Tiffany sadly left her business as many regional graphic designers do after a while.

While most people love the idea of running their own business many of them burn out for many of the reasons I've described above. Trying to do too much desperate to make money to support the family. Not saying this happened to Tiff but it is a common story.

My ideas grew and morphed and the more I did my research it seemed like there was a need for quality, support, and consistency. So many "agencies" in regional areas trying to offer "full-stack services" hate doing the bits they weren't great at.

This is what has led to the Regional Developer launching in 2022. A genuine approach to helping others and building businesses and communities in regional areas while helping to fill service gaps through other quality professionals

COVID hit in 2020 and made me reflect on what I was doing with a regional-based agency working my butt off and still not able to cut away the main job.

A few considerations I had to go through to come to the decision to leave and pursue something I loved. I expect you've had the same challenges.

• Personal finance made it a good time for my family
• We paid off our cars and minimised our expenses
• Imposter sydnrome - after many years of making a full time wage from a part time agency style business on the side did I have what it takes to run my own business.
• Nobody cared that I showed up or didn't show up for my government job. On my last day after 18 yeras only one person acknowledged it was my last day and I wouldn't be there the next day.
• What was I doing, wasting my life in a job day after day that nobody cared if I was there or not.
• There was no loyalty in the government job, once stable and relibable, after a restructure managment demanded I go back full time five days to better service the organisation.
• My wife was awesome and was more than happy for me to leave and pursue something else.
• I'd gone stale in my full time job which was going no where fast. It was so legislated that it became equipvalant to someone on a production line doing the same thing day in and day out. I did however help to support my family for over 18 years for that I am very, very grateful.
• I loved helping people to meet their goals and grow their business and have a passion for helping people

As regional people and locals we have the point of difference that we can be face to face with people but locals also want to support and trust other locals. You’re a shoe in before you get started and having the confidence to deliver a proposal to a customer based on trust and relationship is your key to getting more business.

It can still be hard growing an agency in regional areas though with smaller operators doing work on the side of their main job for next to nothing. Everyone starts somewhere right, I personally built the agency I work with over 10 years with work on the side but found the right people to collaborate with over this time and produce some steller outcomes for our customers. (If I do say so myself)

Here are five things you can do to get more local business pretty easily but they are all things that have a clear value statement that is contextual the customer’s scenario. While they might seem obvious to you they may not be as obvious to your prospect so identifying them as a way and making it seem easy for them to get a good outcome and return could benefit both you and them.

1. Restaurants and cafes – A booking system will save these business time and money so they can concentrate on the process of their business and not on just booking enquiries. While most locations have adopted these systems usually on a monthly fee for specialist system approach the can be expensive. Some of these may SMS the customers reminders and be better than others. Get familiar with the best system and do a comparison of native platform paid plugin one off solutions that could be meeting the same requirements for a cheaper end solution that has the same benefits as a paid SaaS solution.
   
   
2. Google places management – You may do this for free as part of a website setup but you shouldn’t. Getting a google local place or business verified and setup takes time and you should look at what business are verified their listing and if you can help to verify those that haven’t. Doing so is not only helpful but gets you the admin right to assist with updates and branding. You could charge a small yearly fee for this maintenance such as $10 per month noting that it could deliver a large increase in business if it’s done correctly and testimonials are also used with the listing. Setup I would charge probably $200-$300. There are tools available such as LeadsGorilla which can help with figuring out if Google or Facebook pages have been claimed by their owners and if they are missing certain information.
   
   
3. Check for broken links – This one is super simple and you can use a tool like broken link checker to simply check a prospects website for broken links.
   
   
4. META Information – Another super simple one that takes a minute to check but can be more difficult to communicate. If the site is five years or older though there’s a good chance you’ll make an impression if you approach it the right way helpful and willing to listen to the customers other problems.
   
   
5. Financial Advisors & Insurance Brokers - These industry regulated business’ need to make updates regularly to their policies. They might already have someone in-house or a freelancer or agency helping with this. A content update plan as a monthly might just work for these guys but you need to establish trust and a relationship first up.

Become a member and network with other like minded regional marketers, designers, creatives of all types in different parts of Australia and share ideas to grow each other’s business’.

This is a rather hard topic because I know there are lots of people part of the network that love SquareSpace, Wix, or some other hosted website builder but is it really the best solution for you and or your customers?

Perhaps it’s better to do the design part yourself doing the UX wireframe and UI concept for approval by the customer rather than just jumping in and doing something with a nice template. Often it comes down to cost of time and money where you might have a win 60% of the time and that’s good enough to decide these tools are your best tool. I have to point out that these platforms are really nice, well designed for the most part and easy to use which is why your customers might like them at least initially and you can get the kudos you deserve for putting something together that your customer is satisfied with.

• You’re discounting your skills and talent by using these platforms that a five year old can use. You’re telling everyone that it’s easy anyone can build a website and endorsing this to the world. Put up a picture and some text and get an IT guy to do the techy stuff to delegate the domain.
  
  There’s a solutions process that should be followed which is best practice that involves specialists in each area in order to get a more professional product that delivers results. You could use the process with specialist with these platforms but it doesn’t change the fact they are targeted at the end user as a DIY solution.
  
  
• You’re not seeing the project long term for yourself or your customer. You want to have a relationship with your customer that grows their regional business. You want to see them succeed and be part of their story. You want them to shout from the rooftops you’re the best agency in the world. Ok, maybe a little bit too far but the point is using a hosted platform means that you’re delivering your customer to that business for them to make lots of money out of them in hosting and other charges. While you get something up front for the build their may not be as much of a need for you to be involved with them in the future and if you are to charge a maintenance fee, what exactly are you charging for? A couple of emails a year wishing them merry Christmas or letting them know that their website is down.
  
  Far better to have a hosting and maintenance fee that sustains you and gives you freedom to be able to properly manage and be part of their business in a way that means growth for you and for your customer. Why not host the site yourself on a platform you trust with a support team you call by name in Australia. You just need to cover yourself with an SLA and backup, backup, backup and be able to restore or have a site restored for you within 24-48 hours. Sounds terrible I know but most regional customers unless it’s an ecommerce store putting through thousands per day won’t even notice.
  
  
• Accessibility and SEO – I put these two together although their really not related all that much. Many of these DIY builders do not have the same level of support for screen readers or WCAG support. SquareSpace for example don’t have alt tags on their images just to name one. WordPress and Drupal out of the box ticks most of the boxes on basic WCAG requirements.
  
  SEO has seen a big push from marketers on the DIY builders to try to address this negative point which has been a long time argument from professionals that these types of sites just won’t compete for speed and performance. There’s a lot of truth that comes from these marketers, it’s not just all fluff DIY builders do use some super quick content delivery networks (CDN) setups, caching and optimised images ticking the boxes where they can.
  
  However like any platform it often come down to the user or site architect on what they do with the platform after starting the project. For example I’ve seen a SquareSpace score an “F” on a performance rating while getting the same site on WordPress with the same assets score an “A”. One of the things I love to do is to take a site that is performing poorly on a DIY platform and rebuild it using our website builder of choice WordPress with an Oxygen builder setup to rebuild the site within a day and take it from an “F” to an “A”.  We then host the site ourselves so we get ongoing revenue from it rather than the DIY platform.
  
  
• Flexibility to customise – If you’re really truly going through the steps of developing best practice in a business marketing solution then you don’t want platform constraints to hold you back or have to use a work around to achieve the outcome your looking for.
  
  While there are plenty of layout, colour, font, image and content choices there are still plenty of things that can’t be done in these DIY builders that can be done with WordPress or Drupal. Creating custom content or post types with fields is one for me that maintains structure and layout consistency and is something that always gets used on most projects.
  
  
• Webbooks and automation plugin customisation – Most marketers would look at these things ad think its geek stuff. There is however real benefit to a customer being able to integrate multiple systems using web hooks and APIs.

I once ran a large project using Drupal where we had to migrate thousands of records GEO spatial records from a CSIRO database through to some custom mapping capabilities. Some customer modules were needed to be built to pull this data and to interface with the external database on a regular basis. There’s no way this could have been done with an off the shelf DIY builder like SquareSpace or Wix.

My skillset is a developer so it’s natural that I like numbers and facts. Don’t stop reading now just because I’m a geek, these numbers help marketers to reach out to business to establish confidence in their geographical location.

From regionalaustralia.org.au the 2020 estimated percentage of increase change since 2016. Noting this is before COVID so the increase I would expect to be far more significant in more recent years.

Regional cities have increased by 383,760 over four years. Regional population makes up 36% of Australia’s overall population and although not a majority is still 9.36M people.

The following link presents some interesting statistics on business and lifestyle growth in Australia with the top 5 areas boasting the highest entrepreneur rate of business start-ups.

My favourite two stats here though is the % of time of your workday average spent commuting and % of your income spent on mortgage.

1. Sydney – Whatever way you define a workday 7.5 hours or even 12 hours your spending hours travelling to work every week. I actually think these numbers are quite conservative, when I lived in Sydney easily 10 hours per week travelling would have been my routine.
2.  Toowoomba – About half an hour a day or 15 minutes each way.

On the housing affordability side:

1. Sydney – Over 600% of your yearly wage would be mortgage.
2. Wagga wagga – 257%

This indicates you can pay off your house more quickly and have more money in your purse to spend on weekly bills and activities. You’re less of a slave to your assets and happier as a result.

Workbook: Busting Regional City Myths final (tableau.com)

There’s no doubt over the past couple of years people have been moving out of the cities in droves since the COVID pandemic working remotely and living in safe non-lockdown locations has seen a steady increase.

It has changed our lives forever and may I dare say for the better. Gone is sitting in traffic waiting to arrive at your destination or sitting on a train or bus for hours of your day.

Regional Developer embraces this change in our lifestyles for people to take the opportunity to make the switch and move to regional areas.

It’s good for these local economy’s to have population growth and boosting local economies but what’s also great is the increase in health physical and mental benefits.

I will endeavor to provide ten reasons you might want to take on a regional lifestyle working as a regional creative, marketer or developer.

1. Your job can probably be done anywhere – So why not embrace the face that you can work from anywhere just as efficiently and as effectively as you might work in the office. If there’s something that your job requires face to face then why not set aside a week every three months to spend in an office if you have to otherwise Skype, Zoom, Teams and the list goes on.
    
2. Family relationships – This is by far something that has been ignored for too long that hundreds of years ago you’d work alongside your family members in whatever role or job you’d do every second of every day. Whether it be in the field farming or a market you’d work with your family and look after them, caring for their needs. Working from regional Australia means you have more time with family instead of commuting. You can be home for the kids when they get home or go for lunch with your husband or wife.
3. Living affordability – While housing has increased in pricing due to the move of thousands of people to regional areas over the past couple of years it’s still relatively cheaper to live in regional areas than in the city.
4. Mental Health – As I’d originally alluded to your mental health is important, your happiness in regional areas around a routine that you love is something that can be found in regional Australia. Depending on your job you might be able to manage your times around starting early or finishing late, doing your hours but injecting some time at school or with your spouse. Unless you work near-by to your loved ones living in the cities this is generally not possible.
5. Physical Health – Want to get buff or lose some weight regional areas have had a boom in Gyms and fitness in the last ten years with some areas having up to 20 gyms available to go and workout. There’s no cost to your time away from family or your job, just time away from commuting and sitting in a cubical. If you’re a cyclist why not ride 50Km per day or go mountain biking. The small regional town I live in there are several groups of cyclist that get together every morning and head out for a ride before work. Riding or running in the country is a much safer alternative to the cities and has mental and physical health benefits.
6. Opportunity – There’s plenty of opportunities but you might have to get off your but, be a bit creative or work for it - Moving to the country, you bring skills that others may not have or could be employed to improve the lives of others. Why not seek to take hold of opportunities that you may have seen in the cities in a regional area.
7. Global Internet community – Through social media, slack or any other number of networks including regional developer you can network with teams, run your own business, work for someone else remotely and still be able to access rich resources and skills you would normally have to be in an office for.
8. Internet Infrastructure – While the NBN isn’t great in regional areas with most areas still on a FTTN type setup struggling to get 25Mbps there are affordable alternatives like Starlink which will deliver you speeds above 300Mbps and enable you to video conference and work like you’re in the same office building. VPN technology has also evolved so if your employer wants you to be on the same office network this is also possible as if you’re in the next room.
9. Facility costs – While electricity, gas, water is generally more expensive in regional areas you will find many other major expenses cheaper such as private schooling, transport, rates, weddings, cars, insurances, rental of commercial properties.
10. Broaden your skills – Because there are less specialists in regional areas we often take on more skills for better or worse. With Regional Developer we seek to take a specialist approach to problem solving so that the end product is of a higher quality. Regardless of this you will find that you still need to fill some gaps that you wouldn’t normally have to in marketing jobs in the city because you have more people and more resources. What’s to say though that even though you trained as a Graphic Designer you might want to make a switch to Copy, Developer or project manager? Living in Regional Australia may assist you with making the switch and finding your true love and passion that you can devote 100% of your time in.