Web Design Sydney

Professional Web Design Sydney

In this modern world of computers, hand-held devices, and the internet, it is almost certain that the first time any of your customers or clients had any type of interaction with your business, it was via your website.

For businesses in Sydney a website is effectively the modern equivalent of a shop front, and whilst many of those businesses will indeed be retail stores with an actual shop front, for them, and every other business type, it is their website that will be the first impression that over 95% of the people looking for, or researching for, that type of business ,will have of that company.

This speaks to the huge importance of having a professionally designed website for any business in Sydney, whether they are large or small, produce products or offer a service, have one location, many locations, or purely operate online only.

In other words, no matter the type of business you are in, if your website is not up to scratch, not only will you be failing to gain customers who click away as soon as they land on your poorly designed website, worse than that, your competitors who have had the foresight and sense to have their website professionally designed, will be gaining those customers instead.

Whether you already have a website, but feel it is not performing as it should, or you are a new business looking to have a website built for the first time, there is a solution. That solution is to have the experts and professionals at Slinky Web Design Sydney to design and build your new website.

Now, we hasten to add, for a website to be professionally designed and built, there is a process to follow, and it is only fair to you that before we ask you to get in touch we lay out exactly why having a professional web design is important, what the advantages are, and also what the pitfalls are if you decide to go for a quick and cheap fix, which is never the answer we hasten to add.

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Importance of professional web design

One of the reasons that many businesses in Sydney continue to have a poor website and are thus failing to capitalise on all the benefits that a well-designed website can provide, is that the owner or owners of that business fail to understand or appreciate why having a professional-looking website is so important.

It could be that they have genuinely never had it explained to them properly, and are thus ‘in the dark’, so to speak, about why a website is a key component of their business’s success. It might also be that they are not savvy with technology and the internet are therefore reluctant to even start talking to someone about their website for fear of being made to look stupid.

A third reason which is often cited is the expectation of the business owner is that having a new website professionally designed is going to cost tens of thousands of dollars and they just do not have, or are willing to spend, that amount. Whilst there is obviously going to be fee for having a website built, it need not cost an excessive amount, and certainly at Slinky Web Design Sydney, our website design packages are competitively priced.

Also, the stark reality is that the longer a business perseveres with a poor looking and badly functioning website, the cost to it is immeasurable in terms of lost customers, clients, and revenue. Further, the harm to their reputation, branding, and even their ranking on Google are all at risk if they do nothing to improve their website.

Only with a professionally designed website in place can a business take advantage of the benefits which the internet offers them. These benefits will differ from business to business and sector to sector, but regardless of what they are, if your website is substandard, it need not matter as it will not be generating them for you anyway.

Pitfalls of using second-rate web designers

One of the options business owners in Sydney have if they want a new website is to try to take a shortcut and opt for the cheapest option they can find. Often this will be via an online freelancing platform, a one-person designer working out of their home, or worse, a friend of a friend who dabbles in website design.

Now before we go any further let us say that there are many fine and honest people who freelance, including on online platforms such as Upwork, and we are not suggesting that all of them are incapable of building an excellent website, or that they would in any way try to rip you off. In fact, there are many excellent and honest people who work in this way.

Unfortunately, and sad to say, there are some who try their best, but remain poor website designers, and who simply do not have the resources, the skills, and the tools, to design and build a website that would achieve what a business website would need to achieve.

A lot of what happens in terms of the functionality of a website is hidden within the code and those elements of the design that you might consider, ‘under the bonnet’. This means that whilst a website might look fine visually it can also mean when visitors try to click through, or select an item, or enter their details, the website does not function correctly if the person who built it is not skilled enough.

This is just one example of many that leaving the designing and building to well-meaning amateurs is not what your business needs. Worse than that, if a business owner were to simply choose the cheapest option, the end result could be disastrous.

Here are just some of the pitfalls of NOT choosing a professional web design agency:

Long Delays
Poor Communication
Extras Added Which Incur A Further Cost
Work Not Completed
Multiple Website Malfunctions
Poor Visuals and Graphics
Design Is Not Original
Use of Poor Content
Use of Plagiarised or Copyrighted Content
Poor Visitor Experience
Damage to Your Branding
Damage to Your SEO/Google Ranking
Losing Customers to Competitors

This is not a complete list, but surely the risk of just one or two of those issues befalling your business, let alone the possibility that all of them, should be enough for you to decide that going down the route of cheap and quick web design by amateurs is not worth it for your business.

Advantages of having a well-designed website

It goes without saying that businesses in Sydney need and want a website for more than just one reason. One point to note here is that in reality, many business owners are unaware of all the many advantages that a professionally designed website can produce for their business.

Most will assume that it can help convert more prospects into customers and hopefully give them an edge over competitors who have poor websites, but if we were to lay out for them all the benefits of having an excellent website versus an average one, they would be more than pleasantly surprised.

So, just in case you are a Sydney business owner who wants to know everything that a professionally designed website can do for your business, and indeed for yourself as the owner or CEO of that business, read on.

Aids your strategic online marketing

One of the great opportunities that having your business’s website redesigned or completely renewed is that it affords you the opportunity to give your entire online marketing strategy a revamp. A website should never be seen in isolation with regards to marketing online, but instead as an integral part of it, and working in conjunction with other online marketing elements.

One example is email marketing which can bring massive benefits with regards to conversions and customer loyalty. By including within your website several places where visitors have the means to sign up for regular emails, you can impart useful information regarding your industry or your products and services, and obviously make offers to them with a view to them becoming a paid customer.

Another way a website fits into online marketing is with respect to social media. Your social media pages may have many followers, and ideally, you want these followers to visit your website with a view to contacting you, or even buying something. With a poor website, they will quickly click away, but with a professionally designed website, your social media followers are more likely to take the action you want them to take.

The point is, without a good-looking and properly functioning website, any other online marketing you do is compromised and the benefits that your marketing could bring to your business are greatly diminished.

Improved trust

Many of the principles that apply to the offline world, also exist online too. One prime example is with regard to trust. If you were to walk up to the entrance of a business, and it looked like the building has not been maintained, and once inside it was the same, you are likely to think that the business seemed shady and you if had no reason to trust in it whatsoever, you would soon go elsewhere, wouldn’t you?

Well, the same applies to anyone visiting your website. If it looks great and is obviously one which has been professionally designed, the trust factor in your business for anyone visiting is going to be high. On the other hand, if the website looks as though it was built in the 1990s and did not inspire confidence, then trust is going to be low or even zero.

A new website design also gives you the opportunity to ask our design team to ensure they include trust badges which might show membership of a professional body or certification from an independent customer review company showing that you have reached a specific level of customer satisfaction either in terms of numbers of reviews, or better still, numbers of 5-star reviews.

Better branding

Not every business type needs to have strong branding, but regardless of whether yours does or not, it should not be overlooked. For those that would benefit enormously from better branding then your new website design is the ideal opportunity to have your brand improved, or if you wish, to be completed renewed.

There are many individual elements of your website that can be used to enhance the branding of your business. The most obvious ones are with respect to the visual elements of the design such as colours, fonts, images, and most of all your company logo, which can be placed on every page of your website.

By ensuring that the visual elements of your website are kept consistent as we design your website, it can ensure that no matter which pages any visitor visits, they will know immediately that it is your business they are visiting online, and ideally, they will recall that branding the next time they are searching or even recommending a business of your type.

Enhanced local recognition

There are many customers who, when looking for a product or a service online, would much rather deal with a local company than one in another part of the country or even internationally. In these days of the internet, it is important to note that depending on the type of business you run, your competition might as easily exist on the other side of the world, as it does in the next street.

The principle of wishing to ‘buy local’ is as true in Sydney, as it is in any other city, therefore if you wish to be the preeminent company within your niche or business sector in your local area or within Sydney as a whole, it is important that you have your Sydney credentials well signposted on your website.

This can be done in many ways and they include ensuring that Sydney appears in several prominent places, having your address and other locations if you have them, clear to see, and you might even include a local map on strategic places throughout your website.

Better visitor experience

One of the greatest benefits that a business receives from great web design, they receive indirectly, because it is the visitors to their website who are benefitting directly. What we are talking about is the user experience of visitors to your website. The reason this is of paramount importance is that the greater the experience a person has when visiting a website, the more they will remember it for all the right reasons.

By recognising it at the time, or recalling at a later date what a great experience a website provided them, a visitor is more likely to:

Leave Their Details For A Call Back
Ask For A Quotation
Purchase Something
Recommend The Website To Others
Leave A 5-Star Review

Write Online About Their Great Experience
Tell Their Friends On Social Media
NOT Visit A Competitor’s Website
Revisit The Website…This Time To Buy!!

On the contrary, if they had a bad experience on your website, they are just as likely to tell everyone, but this time they will be telling everyone to avoid your website. In addition, they certainly will not become a customer, at least not of your company, which means they become a customer of one of your competitors.

Increased conversions

Whenever the word ‘conversions’ is seen in relation to website design, many people automatically assume that it is referring to people taking out their credit card and buying something there and then. Whilst on many websites that would be a conversion, it does mean that every conversion is a sale.

There are many business sectors where it would be unusual, and in fact, impossible, for a visitor to it to make a purchase. Some obvious examples of these would be landscape designers, divorce lawyers, construction companies, and kitchen renovation companies. With these and many others, before any price or fee is calculated the company and the client or customer would first need to discuss what work was required.

So, in these cases, a conversion would not be a sale but instead a request for a call back, a quotation request, or the filling in of an appointment calendar. In other words, the required call to action was followed. This is where smart web design is able to ensure that the correct message, tone, and content on your website are in place so that visitors feel able to take the action you want them to.

Even where no sale takes place at this point, by having an effective web design that takes someone from landing on your website, through to them making some kind of contact request, as their trust and confidence in your company builds during their time on the website, the chance of them ultimately agreeing to go ahead and purchase the product or service you offer is much greater.

Greater revenue

Greater revenue might seem like a repeat of greater conversions, but they are different. Of course, if you convert more prospects into paying customers due to great website design you are going to increase your revenue, but there are other ways a great website can increase your business’s income.

A professional web design team will be able to showcase the products and services you offer to the maximum. This will include the use of written content, images, videos, and even reviews from previous customers. By ensuring that any journey a prospect takes through your website will place those additional products and services in front of them, they are more likely to want them.

In addition, given that we have already established that a great website design will build increased trust and confidence in your company and its brand, customers will be more confident in choosing your enhanced or premium services or products than just the standard ones, and thus be happy to spend more in dollar amounts to receive them.

Competitive advantage

Imagine the internet did not exist and here in Sydney we lived only in the offline world. Imagine further that you have a competitor whose place of business looks magnificent. Not only does the outside of the building look amazing, but the inside is stunning too. When customers walk in they are not only bowled over by how good it looks but also how easy it is to navigate around.

This is because this competitor has signs throughout the interior showing customers where to go, and how to return to the main floor area. It also has its best products proudly displayed in strategic places, and whenever a customer needs help, they know exactly where to go for assistance, or where to leave their details for that company to contact them.

Let’s face it, if that were what this competitor was doing and you weren’t, it would be no contest. Customers and clients would be flocking to that competitor’s business, not yours. Ok, so that was an imaginary scenario, but it is more real than you think, especially online.

Everything we described in that offline description can happen online, but if we turn the tables and instead it is your website that offers up all those benefits to visitors, not your local competitors, guess whose business beats its competition now? That’s right, yours! So, if you want to get a huge competitive edge over your local rivals, start thinking about asking Slinky Web Design Sydney to design your new website now.

Usability on multiple devices

Those of you of a certain age will remember those old science fiction TV programmes and movies we watched years ago in which people made video calls via devices they held in their hand that were no bigger than a bar of chocolate. At the time it seemed like technology from hundreds of years in the future but jump forward just 30 or 40 years to today, and video calling seems like second nature.

That is especially true with many people having faced lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that has led to a much greater reliance on mobile devices, even for people who would previously not have used them much. For any business which wants to make the most of the greater use of handheld mobile devices, its website needs to be mobile responsive, and if it is not, that business is losing hundreds of potential customers.

It is actually the case that any professional web design agency is not just building one website for a client they are building 3 or 4 versions of it. The others are those versions of the website that are suitable for other devices such as tablets and mobile phones, and if your business wants to target those who use their mobile devices more than their PC or laptop at home, you need these mobile responsive versions in place.

Improved SEO / Google ranking

This next benefit definitely requires some attention because if you are able to combine all the other benefits of having a professionally designed website with this one then there can be no reason why your business in Sydney cannot beat your competition to the point of dominating your local market.

First, it is important to know that when is calculating where it will rank something for a particular search term, Google is ranking individual pages, rather than an entire website. This means that with every page being professionally designed by Slinky Web Design Sydney gives you the opportunity to have every single page of your website ranked highly in Google. Imagine the massive uplift in traffic you will receive when that happens.

However, before we get ahead of ourselves, we need to get those pages ranked first, which is where SEO comes in. Part of SEO takes place on your website, and there are some ranking factors that are more applicable to the visual design of your website than they are to some of the elements that exist in the background and within the coding of your website.

Those visual elements, including the content on your website, will influence 2 important ranking factors that Google measures. They are ‘bounce rate’, and ‘dwell time’ both of which are heavily influenced by how well your website has been designed.

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors to a website that leaves without visiting any other pages. The thinking at Google is that a well-designed website is more likely to attract and encourage visitors to click through to other pages than one that is poorly designed. It follows that the higher the bounce rate, the less Google believes a website is giving visitors a great experience, and thus the ranking of that site is reduced.

Dwell time is a similar assessment of a user’s experience where Google measures how long someone remains on a website having clicked through from Google’s search results. It follows logic that if someone remains on a website for a long period of time, something within that site is keeping them there, and accordingly, Google will increase that website’s ranking.

Enhanced security

It is a sad fact of both the online and the offline world that there dishonest people who we could label as crooks. Online these people are generally given the tag ‘hacker’ and they operate in a number of ways to try to make money from their nefarious online activities.

While some schemes involve attacking the websites of large corporations, hackers are just as likely to target local businesses, and given that Sydney is a large city, there are plenty for them to go after. In truth, you could be located anywhere in the world, and the hacker might see you as an opportunity for attack, and if your website does not have the necessary security in place, then you are not just a target, but an easy target.

With a website designed and built by a professional web design agency such as Slinky Web Design Sydney, then at least you know your website will be as safe as it is possible to be.

Then, even if hackers did try to attack your website, they are going to have a much more difficult time and are likely to move on quickly to another business’s website.

Greater website performance

The term ‘website performance’ could be applied in lots of ways, but when we use it with respect to web design we are talking about the way it functions. To explain further, the functions we are referring to are those which can be measured and reported with respect to factors like load time and uptime.

Just like the bounce rate and dwell time we mentioned previously, the way a website performs is measured both by Google in terms of its ranking factors, and also by visitors, not using software, but with respect to their experience. For example, imagine how a visitor will regard a business if its website loads quickly, is always available and all the functions within that website work properly.

Compare their experience with someone who visits a website that takes any more than 10 seconds to load, any other page which opens and has images takes time too, and worse, the website is sometimes offline. All of these issues are likely due to poor website design, and by now you should know the answer as to how to resolve them. Clue: Look at the title of this page.

Less stress for you

We have added this final benefit, not as an afterthought, but instead as recognition that if you are a business owner, anything that you do to enhance your business must surely also help make the ownership and management of your business a less stressful task.

With a professionally designed website being the online hub for your online marketing and giving your business an online presence that your visitors, prospects, and existing clients recognize as yours due to strong branding, and one which they enjoy visiting, all the other benefits we have outlined already, will surely occur. Need a reminder of them all? Here you go…

Aids Your Strategic Online Marketing
Improved Trust
Better Branding
Enhanced Local Recognition
Better Visitor Experience
Increased Conversions

Greater Revenue
Competitive Advantage
Usability On Multiple Devices
Improved SEO / Google Ranking
Enhanced Security
Greater Website Performance

If we add in this final one about less stress for you, or should we word that more positively and say, a greater sense of enjoyment and satisfaction when running your business, then there surely cannot be any doubt that professional web design is a must for any business in Sydney, including your own.

Specific elements of our web design service

Hopefully by now, having seen all the many benefits that having a professionally designed website can provide for your business in Sydney, you are keen to learn more about how Slinky Web Design Sydney can make them a reality.

There are many specific skills and actions that we undertake, all stemming from the vast experience and professionalism that our web design team in Sydney brings to the table every single day for our clients. Here are just some of them.

Full consultation

At the end of the day, this is your website that is going to be the online storefront for your business, so it is as important to us, as we are sure as it is to you that we match your expectations. More than that, we want the website we design for you to be as close to what you need for your business as possible.

For that to occur we will ensure that we consult with you on as many elements of your website’s design as we can, and of course, we will give you the best possible advice we can with respect to ensuring that once the website is complete it looks and functions in reality as well as, if not better, than you had ever hoped it would.

Premium level website design

As we mentioned previously, anyone can take a template, add a few words of text, and claim that they have built a website. That might be ok for a part-time blogger, but we are sure you want better than that for your business.

That is why when it comes to Slinky Web Design Sydney, our highly skilled team will design and create a website for your business that stands out from the crowd. By that, we do not mean it will have loads of flashing colours, but instead, when anyone visits it, they will immediately know they are on a website that is exceptional, and by extension, presume that the business that owns it is exceptional too.

As well as the fact that your website will look great, it will also function in a way that makes every visit to it a pleasure for the person who has clicked through. This means fast load times, no lagging when images are loading, all internal links working, and as such, Google is going to take note, and all being well improve your ranking on the search engines for specific search terms relevant to your business.

Website design packages to suit every business

At Slinky Web Design Sydney, we appreciate that every business is different and has different needs with respect to its website design. That will also extend to the budget each business has for its website. For this reason, we have created a choice of website design packages that we hope will cover just about every business owner who is looking for our web design services.

Whether you choose our Standard, Design Pro, or eCommerce package, we believe that what is included in each of them provides every business an opportunity to have a full functioning, professionally designed, and awesome-looking website, at a cost that offers excellent value for money. We even have monthly payment plans to make having a professionally designed website affordable for every business size or budget.

Additional services from Slinky Web Design Sydney

Once your website is live, it needs to be maintained, and you may also want to take steps to dominate the search engines for local searches to really push your competitors aside. If either of those two needs is present then speak to Slinky Web Design Sydney about our teams of professionals who can provide those additional and important services.

First, we have website management and maintenance services that help to ensure your website continues to function as it should, and critically it also has a number of security features that make your website protected and as safe from hackers and malware as it is possible to be.

As for beating your competition out of sight, that is where our dedicated SEO team comes to the fore. They have experience and knowledge that few online agencies have, and that is knowing what Google is looking for when it comes to ranking websites, and how to achieve that.

With this knowledge, they can help your website gain high rankings on Google and other search engines, meaning whenever someone searches for your business type in Sydney, your business’s website is the one that appears at or near the top of the results.

How to get started

Whether your business is large or small, thriving or struggling, the one thing they all have in common is the need for a professionally designed website. At Slinky Web Design Sydney, we would be proud to create your website, but obviously, we need to discuss your specific needs with you first so that we can best design and build your website for you.

Get in touch with us today

Please try to include as much information in the ‘Message’ box as possible as this will allow one of our professional web designers to better understand your request and to advise you accordingly when they respond. Even at that stage, you are under no obligation and it will have been our pleasure to have helped you regardless of whether you proceed or not.