Small business websites that back up your expertise
A process-driven design & development process
User journeys optimised to keep your audience engaged
Keyword research to kickstart discoverability
Content that tells your story
Colours, styles and graphic touches to amplify your brand
Intuitive self-management
Reliable post-launch support
Marketing strategy to drive growth
You're clever. Walk the talk.
Your website should be more than a glorified business card. Stand out with a brand, a website and messaging that tells the story of exactly how clever you are and converts leads into clients.
A quality website, fast
We know you’re busy launching your new business. Our starter process has been honed from working with hundreds of businesses just like yours.
We take on only 1 starter website per month. This helps us maintain balance, while giving our best to every project. This has us on a schedule with a 2-month waitlist, but clients do move things around on occasion, so let us know your timescale, and we’ll see what we can do. It all starts with a project inquiry.
A logical process for reliable delivery of web design in Sydney & beyond
As Steve Jobs said, “Design is not just what it looks like. Design is how it works”.
- 1. Start with strategy
- We get loads done on a tight budget with our 2-hour website strategy workshop where we know all the right questions to ask to translate your business into an online plan.
- Keyword research for your ‘money pages’ (the revenue-generating pages on your website) to find out what people type into Google when they’re searching for services like yours.
- Content strategy that connects search traffic from people looking for your expertise with messaging that speaks their language.
- We’ll conduct a brand and asset audit to check you have all of the brand assets a new business needs for launch. Don’t have a brand yet? No worries! You can add branding services to your project.
- Create a sitemap for the website’s architecture based on the keywords you can rank for and a user journey flow that aligns with your services and user experience best practices.
- Decision on WordPress vs Squarespace (vs other) to suit your business needs.
- Zoom session to review.
- 2. User experience wireframing
- Low-fidelity wireframes: quick, undesigned, ultra-simple blueprints of your website pages so we can visualise your site and make structural changes fast, without getting stuck on design details.
- Content planning: work out the narrative for each page and the user journey through the sales process for each of your services.
- Decide on calls to action and conversion points.
- Zoom session to review.
- 3. Copywriting
- Delays in content delivery are the biggest cause of cost blowouts on website projects. We take the content roadblock out of the equation by including copywriting in all of our web design projects. We’ll get the clever out of your brain to help you talk the talk in all of your website messaging.
- No extra workshopping is needed—we use your words from our strategy workshop, where we’ve already extracted nuggets of gold from your mind to incorporate into the content framework we created for you in Stage 2.
- We’ll guide you on any extra content we need for less important pages, such as legal pages (our partnership with LawPath gives Australian clients 2 legal policies for free and we have a discount arrangement with Termaggedon for overseas clients) and will get that from you before the next project stage is signed off.
- Zoom session to review.
- 4. Web design
- This is where we fully design the blueprints created at the wireframes stage.
- We apply your brand colour scheme to all aspects of the website to meet accessibility contrast standards.
- Addition of your brand fonts and creation of a typography scale for mathematically perfect type spacing.
- Optimization and upload of all of your brand assets and allocation of photography and graphics throughout the site design.
- Zoom session to review.
- 5. Development
- Custom development to implement the design exactly as intended—no forcing our carefully planned design to fit another developer’s template or theme.
- Scaleable, maintainable development execution to set you up for site growth.
- Accessibility-conscious development practices to help more people who want to use your services understand your website.
- Foundations that can be iterated on easily and affordably.
- Speed and performance optimization to prevent users from leaving before your website has loaded.
- SEO optimization from our keyword research and site registration with Google and Bing.
- Mobile optimization to add mobile-specific elements to the site where they are needed (i.e. bigger buttons with more space between them for easier touch).
- Quality assurance testing and bug fixes. There are always bugs in any website development, these can relate to a specific functionality request or to a weird conflict in one of the site plugins. Instead of pretending that bugs won’t be a stage we have to factor in time for, we allow for it to keep the train on the tracks.
- Zoom session for feedback and training: our combined live training and feedback session is universally loved by our clients for it’s efficiency and usefulness as it’s tailored precisely to your needs. We’ll make any changes needed to your site in this session and you’ll get training on how to update the website at the same time. This session will be recorded and cut up into useful videos that you can refer to later.
- Go live—your site is ready to launch! We’ll handle your dns records to point your domain name to your new website and will index your website with Google and Bing so it can be found in a search engine.
- 5. Training and support
- We don’t build and run. We’re with you on this journey for the long haul.
- All of our projects are covered for unlimited support for 14 days following go-live. During this time, we usually provide quick videos in response to any ‘how to’ questions that come up as you start exploring the site, so you can refer to them later.
- Whether you’re on WordPress or Squarespace, we offer Website Management plans to look after the basics, and add-ons for extra support as you need it — so you’re only ever paying for what you need.
- We offer website help by the hour or by the day and our bulk hourly packs are a popular option for clients who want occasional quick help on-demand.
Nic provided a fantastic and easy to understand service. Importantly Nic had a range of options that were not even in our radar yet relevant to our business! Nic explained things with warmth and humility. Our Company highly recommends Nic for her strategic insights, writing skills, design options and personable approach.
Nic is an extremely knowledgeable designer, an absolute whiz on WordPress and will work with you to create an amazing website while making sure Google loves you too!
Small business web design packages
Invest in solid foundations you can build on. Our starter sites are ready for strategic and flexible future growth—without reinventing the wheel when you’re ready to scale.
Need more info? Check out our Guide to Web Design Cost.
Starter Clever Website
Our Starter projects typically range from $7.5k to $15k, depending on many factors, including the functionality requirements of your website.
Get started
Branding services
Brands that build business value. Pro services don’t need to be dull. Add branding to your website project and let us help you be you.
Lead generation systems
Most small businesses don’t have budget for sales staff. The clever thing is, these days you can automate that!
Marketing solutions: one-day roadmap
Get out of the weeds and get direction on your marketing growth engine, the systems needed to support it and an action-packed roadmap in a single day.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to worry about SEO?
- That depends! If you want to be found in search results, then yes. According to Search Engine Journal, almost 93% of all web traffic comes through search engines. Relying on referrals alone is leaving a massive chunk of your potential market on the table. SEO doesn’t need to be hard, but hitting ‘all the Googles’ is a good starting point to getting found online.
- We include SEO for all of our custom website packages and will explore the ways in which SEO can help connect your business with your ideal clients as part of your Website Strategy Workshop.
- Our SEO services can be as simple as structuring your website navigation to be keyword-friendly to more advanced search optimisation tactics across landing pages and blog posts to boost the visibility of your content in the eyes of Google and other search engines.
Will the website you build for me work on tablets and mobile phones?
Absolutely. Responsive design is a must-have these days and a basic web standard. All of our websites are designed to be responsive across desktop, tablet and mobile devices. We also go the extra mile and design device-specific layouts when a basic responsive design doesn’t ‘respond’ exactly the way we want it to across devices. This ensures your site is both looking and performing optimally no matter what device is being used to view it.
What web platform do we build on?
We build most of our starter websites in Squarespace or WordPress. We’ll help advise you on the best platform to meet your needs, taking into account where you are in your business journey, how much marketing you plan to do, and the integrations you need to hook up (now or down the line). Love another system? We’ve worked with just about everything, so feel free to ask us about your preferred platform.
Will you write my website content?
Yes! Getting your text is always the biggest roadblock to project completion, so our website copywriting service is included on all starter websites to eliminate the holdups and get your website live already! All sites include a strategy workshop, where we know all the right questions to ask to transform your thoughts into words. We then filter that through some keyword research, structure everything for the best user experience (and just the way Google likes it), and voilá—content done. Find out more about our copywriting service here.
What legal documents do I need to include on my website?
- All websites must include Terms & Conditions (also known as Terms of Service) and a Privacy Policy at a bare minimum to comply with the Australian Privacy Act.
- We offer our Australian clients two free website legal docs thanks to our partnership with LawPath. For our overseas clients, we can hook you up with a discount on Termageddon — the online legal document generator.
- For more info on website legals, check out our article, Privacy deep dive: why is privacy important for your website visitors?
Do you do branding too?
- Yes! We’ve won LogoLounge awards for our branding work and are often called on to redesign or revamp the brand identity for evolving businesses.
- We’ve done loads of brand fix-its for branding that does more harm than good, so we know it’s better to get a professional brand from the get-go if you have the budget for it (if you don’t have budget yet, we can advise on that too without you throwing money at something that will damage your brand). Startup branding doesn’t need to be a full corporate identity that you aren’t ready for, but a simple professional brand that builds trust with your clients will make the investment on your website pay off faster.
- Some of our favourite projects are the ones we are involved with all aspects of design strategy from the ground up. This process always produces a great outcome because we’re working with you on every aspect of your identity, and aren’t trying to rework someone else’s design to fit your digital presence (which often doesn’t work if a print designer has done the branding). Read more about Branding & Creative Direction.
- As we like to keep branding strategic as a key element of your digital identity, branding cannot be purchased as a standalone service.
Can you help me automate my marketing?
One aspect of the Tech Intelligence spoke of our Amplify Your Clever Framework is to look at the opportunities for automation within your workflows. Be it your marketing funnel or your onboarding process, we’ll get under the hood and see what you can automate and what tech you need to make it happen. Book a Clever Day to get your marketing automations flying.
How long will it take to launch my website?
Most starter websites are completed in 1–2 weeks.
I'm not in Sydney. Do you work with overseas clients?
Due to timezone compatibility, we primarily work with small businesses and consultants in Australia, New Zealand and the US west coast. We have plenty of experience working around timezones, and have been working an international remote team for over a decade (long before the pandemic made remote working the go-to!). So if you’re in a timezone where your day is our night here in Sydney, we’ll ‘automagically’ get stuff done while you’re snoozing.
Do you provide training on how to use the website?
- We include a live training session at go-live to get you up-to-speed on how to use your new site and also provide a range of materials to help you self-manage your website.
- All of our website design packages include 30 days of unlimited ‘ask us anything’ support after the site goes live. We also cover all hosting and license fees until go-live.
- By the time your site is live, we’ll be good mates already. You’ll know we’ve got your back and will be around for any questions you have.
Can you sort out my hosting and maintenance?
Yes, and most clients keep their hosting and site maintenance with us (although you can move it to another host if you prefer). Hosting and the cost of your premium site plugins and themes are included in our Clever Care plan. We keep all of your plugins up-to-date as part of our daily/weekly/monthly maintenance schedule. These benefits and software savings are available only to Studio Clvr clients.
Can you help me make changes to my site down the track?
Of course! We’ve got you covered well beyond your website launch. You can book us for a Clever Day or hourly on-demand support where we can either work with you via Zoom to make live changes to your site, or get under the hood and sort it all out on your behalf.
Why should I hire Studio Clvr instead of a freelancer?
We don’t just build websites. We build websites that actually work hard to move your business forward. If you just want to tick the ‘need a website’ box on your marketing plan, there are loads of folks out there who’ll get you that for cheap. Or, if you want to make back your investment on the website and continue to bring in ongoing leads and sales, our clever process will get you there.
Can we just jump on a call?
I get it, you’ve hit website form overload and just want to talk to a human. You can schedule a quick 15 min chat with Nic here: https://studioclvr.as.me/quick-call.
Ready to launch with your best foot forward?
Get the right help to get your business off to a solid start with value-packed foundations you can build on.
