Web Design

Sagepixels web design for Business Presence, Lead Generation & Conversion with understanding

Web Design + Development To Establish or Expand Your Web Presence

Design is what makes your content shine!

94% of first impressions of a website are related to its design. 

84% of the consumers believe that having a website makes a business more credible than just a social media page (2015 survey by Clutch), and 75% of the internet users will never visit a store or an office if they cannot find information about it online. (2022 Survey by BrightLocal)

51% of the consumers expect a business to have a website where they can learn about its products or services. (2023 survey by Zendesk)

If you are a freelancer, personal brand, business owner or a budding entrepreneur thinking of web design services to go online for the first time, or a site owner thinking of remodelling and restructuring your web presence for better visibility, engagement and efficiency in conversion, please get in touch with us.

We will sit down with you to explore, strategise, plan, and establish practical ways to increase your brand visibility, improve engagement with prospects, and enhance conversion.

Here are our answers to some of the questions you may have before contacting us.

Web Design FAQ

General Questions

In very simple terms, business or a brand website hosts business or brand information as text, photographs, graphics and video or audio files on webpages and serves them to the visitors when requested.

Another way to look at a business website is to consider it as the virtual representation or even a virtual mirror of your real world business.

We will keep on referring to this description throughout this website and on our blog as well.

Just like your real world business serves to the needs of your customers, your business website should server your prospective and current customers. In other words, although the website is yours, it is not for you!

It depends on where you are now and where you want to go with your business or brand.

There are many successful and self-sustaining businesses and brands that do not have websites.

If you are a local business with clients lining up at your door and unable to supply the demand, you may not need a website at this moment.

Having said, nowadays everyone searches google to check authenticity, look at the reviews and find locations; for those reasons, even the local businesses that do not wish to do any serious marketing tend to maintain online presences at least with simple brochure type websites.

A domain name is the address of your website. Similar to how your house has a unique address, each website has a unique domain name.
For example, the domain name of this website is ‘sagepixels.com.au’.

The text bit after the first ‘dot’ of the domain name is referred to as the TLD (Top-Level Domain). It helps categorise and identify the type, purpose, and, when applicable, the geographical area of the website.
The ‘.au’ bit after the ‘.com’ bit of this website means that the website is an Australian website.

This gives confidence to prospective customers that the website is a registered Australian business because the ‘.com.au’ TLD is obtainable only by a registered business in Australia with an Australian Business Number (ABN).

Yes, you can, and more often than not, you should!

For example, this site is sagepixels.com.au, but if you type sagepixels.com into the address bar, you get redirected to the same place.

If the domain name is the address of a property, hosting is the physical space that belongs to that address.
Call it your land!
Similar to how your land has physical attributes like length, width, and area, hosting spaces too have physical limits and attributes that may or may not make them suitable for building your house on them; which, in this analogy, is the structure of your website.

The same way a lot of traffic and visitors need wide roads and larger spaces, websites with a lot of visitors and content are going to need a lot of bandwidth and space. The good news is that even high-quality hosting space, unlike land, is quite cheap nowadays thanks to the advancements in technology over the last couple of decades.

You got the address (Domain name).

You got the land (Hosting space).

We construct your building (Website).

What you are going to fill the building with is your content! Without content, your website is an empty building, no one is going to find useful. Content consists of text, graphics, photos and videos.

We make the design after looking at the content that needs to be delivered, and we call this ‘content driven design’

It simply means we look at the content and design the site for the content, instead of sticking content into a pre-made design or a template.

Or to use an analogy, we simply cut the coat to fit the man, not the man to fit the coat!

Ideally, your domain name should be your business or company name.
If you have already chosen your business name and registered it but the domain name is not available, we can try a few language tricks and hacks to come up with something that is close enough.

If you haven’t registered your business name, you can look for a business name for which you can purchase the domain name as well.

You register a domain with a Domain Registrar of your choice.

When you register a domain, you get the right to use that domain name; in other words, you just rent it, no one can own a domain.

The registrant can be a person or a company and the registrant retains the rights to use the domain name. So, it is important that either you or your business entity registers the domain name.

When we purchase domain names on behalf of our clients, we do the purchasing under the client names and create accounts at the domain registrars under client names with separate  usernames and passwords. We hand over all these information to the clients on a printed document and secure digital file which we permanently delete as soon as our service agreement periods expire.

Domain registration prices vary from $10 – $30 per year in general.
Prices usually depend on the TLD you choose, the registrar, and the registration period.

Web hosting has to be purchased from a hosting service provider.

For all the sites we design and develop we use our own hosting services providers whom we have chosen based on speed, uptime, reliability and price.

All the sites we design and develop are standards compliant websites with friendly user interfaces and mobile optimisation for excellent user experience.

We design your site for the content you provide to be used by your customers and audiences. So, for the content to be of high quality, the copy, graphics and visuals have to be of high quality.

Web design process questions

For most websites, 12 weeks from the time of receiving all the finalised copy/text, graphics, and images from the client.

You can write the content yourself or get a copywriter to do it for you. We recommend hiring a copywriter who is competent in copywriting for the web.

Please note that no copywriter knows what your business is, what you offer or your vision for the future, so it is your job to sit down with your copywriter and provide the information he or she needs to convert your information into an audience-centric, easily readable, SEO friendly copy or a message for your website.

Let us reiterate here: Yes, the content has to be target audience-centric, easily readable and search engine optimisation friendly to generate the desired impact; hence the services of a competent copywriter!

Yes, the content of the site includes logos, graphics, photographs, and even videos depending on what you want to tell your audience.
We need all the content for us to align them with your targets and to plan the information architecture before getting into the design and development.

If you want us to provide the Content Services to produce the visual content, please let us know well in advance for us to discuss, plan and produce the required content.

We use WordPress as the content management system to build websites.

The structure or the ‘design’ of the site is done separately and integrated into the content management system after the content is finalised. This is the reason why we need all the text, images, graphics and other visuals prior to starting the design process.

We don’t use other platforms anymore.

WordPress, unlike some other proprietary commercial site-builders, used by marketers presenting themselves as web designers, is a true open source CMS that can be modified by users and installed on a servers of user’s choice.
At the time of writing this content (November 2023), nearly 44% of websites run on WordPress and the reasons for that market share of WordPress are compelling.
Having said that, WordPress is not the solution required by all websites. If your project requires a different technology, we will tell you at the very first meeting after understanding your requirements. 

Yes, we do and we also provide the technical management as well.

If what you need is a simple change like a colour alteration or a text update, a site redesign is not what you need. Those sorts of changes fall into the category of site updates.
We can certainly help you to find someone to do that for you.

Any major redesign, in reality, is a new build. We do the new site while your existing site stays live and switch to the new one once we finish the new build and testing, we push the new site live. The front end user, i.e., your audience sees the new ‘redesign’ of the same domain.

All the sites we build are responsive and mobile-optimised.
We start our design process by paying attention to the mobile version first. If a site doesn’t do the job on mobiles, which is the primary mode contemporary content consumption, how good it looks on a large desktop monitor is immaterial.

We set up the SEO functionality on all the websites we develop and specially optimise your homepage and the main services page to make them discoverable via Google and other search engines.

Any further advanced search engine optimisation will come under separate SEO packages.

That depends!

This is a gimmie offered by many, more often than not without objectives and context.

The real question is, the first page of what? Initial optimisation we perform may even bring your site up at the very top after being indexed by Google if your site has a very unique name and the search result page is for a search of that unique name.

As a business, we need to figure out what you want to be known for, what people search for and make sure that we put in the work to ensure your site comes up when people search for what you offer in the relevant locale; and that requires work!

Three options are available.

  1. Build and take over:
    We build, and you look after everything from thereon.
    We will train you or your nominated person initially via a set of online resources, followed by a one-on-one training session to ensure you have grasped all basics you need to do the job.

  2. Build and provide total maintenance:
    We do all the site backend work for you, including uploading your regular content to the website.
    Does not apply to eCommerce sites (Please check the third option)
    Backend access is only available to our staff.

  3. Build and provide technical maintenance:
    We provide the technical maintenance and updates while you look after the content and product/sales aspects of your website.
    All ecommerce site maintenance agreements are provided under this category.
    Access to the technical backend is restricted and available only to our staff.

All the sites we manage are backed up on regular basis.
Furthermore, we perform all the major technical updates, such as WordPress version updates, script and plugin updates on a mirror site we create, test and then only push the updated mirror to live site to ensure smooth, uninterrupted functioning.

If you take over the site maintenance you will be doing this yourself. 

If you enter into a maintenance agreement with us, which will include hosting, only our team will perform the updates.

Not a problem.
We purchase your domains and hosting on your behalf by creating separate accounts at domain registrars and hosting providers. 
At the end of the agreement term or when you want to leave, we just handover those accounts to you.

Cost related questions

Our fee is directly proportionate to the number of hours each of our team members has to work to complete the project.

The provided costs are excluding taxes (if and when applicable), and are approximations for you to get an estimate of the financials involved.
The final fee will depend on the components and the total workload required for a customised solution tailored to each client’s needs.

Our fees start at $1500 (AUD).

Domain registration fees vary depending on the TLD, the registrar, and the length of the registration period.

For .au ccTLDs (.au country code top level domains), you can visit the .au Domain Administration Limited (auDA) and check out all the registrars and prices yourself.

For other country code TLDs, please visit the respective ccTLD authority of that country or authorised registrars.

For generic TLDs (.com, .net, .org, etc.), just do a Google search to find authorized registrars. We do the domain purchasing on your behalf as a part of our web designing service, and we do not charge extra fees or commissions for providing this service.

Depends on the requirements of your website, and what we charge usually varies between $25 – $35 per month for most websites.

This applies for copywriting by us.

If you provide the entire copy (text) of the website, there won’t be any fees incurred. Again, the fee depends on the number of hours our copywriters have to work.

Applies to branding and design by us.

If you provide all the branding and graphic elements, no fee will be incurred.

Applies to Photography and Videography by us.

If you provide all the visuals, any fees won’t be incurred.
We do not charge fees for royalty-free image searches.

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