Most potential customers will check out your social media presence, Google reviews and your website before they contact you directly. Your website is the only place online where you have complete control over your message and delivery, free from the whims of social media developers with their own agendas, or Google’s ever-elusive algorithm.
And if you’re like many of my clients, you’ve been burned before. You know that gut-wrenching feeling of seeing your site malfunction, or go down completely, with no idea how it went so wrong - or more importantly, how to get it back online ASAP.
There are some awesome developers out there who can write well-structured code in their sleep, but don’t prioritise user experience or have a background in design. And there are plenty of website designers out there who can set up a site on a platform like Wordpress using prebuilt themes with little to no coding experience. But would you trust a car detailer to service your car? Or a nail technician to cut your hair?
You want someone who can write their own code, but also has a talent for creating beautiful user experiences. Designs that encourage your visitors to buy your products or contact you directly, supported by functional code that works.
kdesign is just me - Kirstan - and I’ve been creating user friendly websites since 2008. Before then, I completed a degree in visual communication and worked for a few years as a graphic designer before heading back to study website development the old-fashioned way - in a classroom - learning best-practice PHP and mySQL.
Back in ‘08, developers had to create all of our websites from scratch, using PHP, HTML and CSS to set up a database-driven site which allowed businesses to update the information on their own websites without coding knowledge.
The Wordpress platform started out as a basic blogging platform back in 2003, and for a good 10 years it was still finding it’s feet, with the help of a large community of developers. Fast-forward to the present, and it’s now fully capable of supporting ecommerce, membership sites, learning modules and so much more.
There are two main variations of Wordpress - wordpress.com, and wordpress.org.
Wordpress.com is what’s called a ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) solution. You sign up, pay a monthly fee, and choose from a restricted range of themes and plugins (often at an additional cost). Your website sits on their servers, and while they take care of updates for you, there are lots of restrictions and they are often slow to roll out new functionality.
Wordpress.org is a package of files that‘s downloaded from their servers, and then uploaded to the website hosting provider of your choice (usually with the help of a developer). There is an enormous amount of both free and paid themes and plugins out there. There’s lots of rubbish but there are plenty of free gems like Woocommerce for ecommerce and Ninja Forms for secure contact forms.
There’s a good comparison article here if you want to read more.
If you want the ability to manage your own content yourself and don’t have much knowledge of coding, then yes - Wordpress is a great solution. It’s relatively quick and affordable to launch as the main structure has already been created and tested by millions of people around the world. And most importanly, if you can use a browser, you can manage your site!
If you want peace of mind that your developer can build you a solid solution on budget, and will be around in future to support your site as it grows if needed, please email kirstan (at) kdesign.com.au today, to see if we would be a good fit.
“No words for this absolute super star of a web designer. K Design is a small Australian business delivering the goods above and beyond. Nothing is ever too much to ask and she works tirelessly to get the end result. Thank you Kirstan and K Design for our FABULOUS new website. You can see her beautiful work here: www.stagency.com.au”
Melanie Grace, Stagency The Styling Agency
“From the first consultation it was clear that Kirstan was going to make our web page development simple and easy to navigate, her guidance and knowledge made it a stress-free experience”
Sarah Rendell, Community Children’s Centres SA
“Kirstan’s expertise in building our website was evident from when we first met. She came equipped with lots of ideas for layouts, and listened to what we wanted our website to look like. The whole process was made easy and the end result is working well for us. The cost was also much lower than we had anticipated.”
Ann Morrison, Surrey Downs Community Children’s Centre
“Both Chris and myself would like to thank you so very much for looking after us during a fairly stressful time when our website crashed due to our ‘advertising guru’ going bust. As 80% of our work is generated through Google searches and our website we were absolutely devastated that we would have to totally rebuild our site from scratch again. Chris and I have absolutely no idea when it comes to this type of stuff and you just made everything so clear and more importantly, we truly trusted you from the moment we contacted you and you brought this calm over the whole situation. We have recommended you to several of our personal friends whom are also in business and will continue to do so. Thanks again, we love your work!”
Natalie Polvari, Urban Accent Pty Ltd
“Kdesign have done a great job in designing our new website. It is easy to use and incorporates everything that we wanted and enables us to clearly and easily pass information on to the community. Kirstan was always helpful, offered advice and also listened to us at the same time.”
Sharon Floyd, Modbury Community Children’s Centre
