Websites, domains and hosting

What we do

• New websites for small businesses, built to load fast
• Tired sites rebuilt or tidied up rather than replaced
• Domains registered, transferred and renewed on time
• Hosting set up, or moved somewhere faster and cheaper
• Email on your own domain, set up properly
• SSL certificates, so the browser stops warning visitors
• Local SEO basics: titles, descriptions, structure, Google listing
• Google Business Profile set up and connected to the site
• Contact forms that reach you instead of vanishing
• Old WordPress sites secured, updated or retired

What a small business site actually needs

Clear pages that say what you do, where you do it and what it costs, a phone number that works as a link on a phone, a contact form that arrives, and speed. That is most of it.

Speed matters more than design fashion. Half your visitors are on a phone, often on mobile data, and a site that takes five seconds to appear loses a proportion of them before they have seen anything. It is also a ranking factor in Google, so a slow site is penalised twice.

Structure matters because it is how search engines understand you. A separate page for each service and each area you cover will out-perform one long page trying to mention everything, because someone searching for a specific problem in a specific suburb should land on a page about exactly that.

What it does not need is an animation on every scroll, a video header that takes three seconds to load, a chat widget nobody answers, or a content management system so complicated you have to pay someone to change a phone number.

Why sites get slow and expensive

Most small business sites are WordPress, and most of those have accumulated between fifteen and forty plugins. Each one adds code to every page and is another thing that needs updating, can break, and can be exploited. It is why the same sites are slow, fragile and repeatedly hacked.

Shared hosting adds to it. Cheap hosting puts many sites on one server, and when a neighbour is busy, your site is slow for reasons nothing to do with you.

There are two honest paths. If the site genuinely needs to be edited constantly by non-technical staff, keep a content management system and maintain it properly — fewer plugins, real updates, backups and a decent host. If it changes a few times a year, it can be built as plain fast pages, which loads in a fraction of the time, costs almost nothing to host, and has essentially nothing to attack.

We will tell you which one you are rather than defaulting to whichever suits us. Plenty of businesses are paying monthly for a system they touch twice a year.

Domains: the thing worth getting right

Your domain is the most valuable digital thing the business owns. Everything — website, email, invoices, logins — hangs off it, and losing control of it is a genuinely serious event.

So: the domain should be registered to your business, with your details, in an account you control and can log into. Not your previous web designer's account, not a former employee's, not a reseller's, with nobody at the business able to get in.

Set auto-renewal and make sure the contact address is one someone actually reads. Expired domains have taken businesses offline for weeks, and a lapsed .com.au can be picked up by someone else.

For .com.au domains there are eligibility rules tied to an ABN or business name, and the details have to match. We can check yours and fix it before a renewal turns into a problem. If you are not sure who controls your domain right now, that is worth finding out this week rather than at renewal.

Email on your own domain

Email at your own domain is not the same job as the website, and the two do not have to live in the same place. Most businesses are best served by Microsoft 365, which also covers Office, file storage and Teams. See Microsoft 365 and email set-up.

What matters underneath is the DNS: the MX records that route your mail, plus SPF, DKIM and DMARC, which are what stop your messages going to junk and stop other people sending as you. Most small business domains have at least one of these wrong, which quietly costs them delivered email.

We sort that side out whether or not we touch your website, and it is one of the higher-value half-days a business can buy.

Being found locally

For a local business, the biggest single lever is not the website at all. It is your Google Business Profile — the listing with the map, the hours, the photos and the reviews. It appears above the ordinary results and gets most of the clicks.

The site's job is to support it: matching name, address details and phone, a page for each service, a page for each area you serve, and content that answers what people actually search for rather than describing the business in the abstract.

Reviews move local rankings more than anything else that is within your control, and recency counts. Asking every satisfied customer, with a direct link, beats any amount of work on the site.

We set the technical side up properly — titles, descriptions, structured data, a sitemap, fast pages, Search Console — and we will be honest that the rest is reviews and time. Anyone promising you the top spot by a date is guessing.

Security on the website side

An abandoned WordPress site is a liability. Hacked small business sites are usually used to send spam or host scam pages rather than to attack the owner, which is why nobody notices until the domain's reputation is damaged and email starts bouncing.

If you have a site you no longer update, the choice is to maintain it properly or retire it and replace it with something static. Leaving it is the worst of the options.

Every site should be on HTTPS — browsers now warn visitors about pages that are not, which costs enquiries. Certificates are free and automatic on any decent host, so there is no good reason left to be without one.

And the site needs a backup you have tested, separate from the host's own, so a bad update or a compromise is an afternoon rather than a rebuild.

How we work on this

Quoted per job. A small brochure site, a rescue of an existing one, a domain and email sort-out and an ongoing maintenance arrangement are different pieces of work, and you can take any of them separately.

You own everything at the end: the domain in your account, the hosting in your name where you want it, and the site's files. We do not hold a business hostage to its own website, which is a large part of why businesses come to us with sites they cannot edit or move.

If what you need is beyond us — an online store with complex stock and payment requirements, or a custom application — we will say so and tell you what kind of firm to look for. We would rather that than take on something we would do badly.

Typical jobs

A typical job: a business whose site took six seconds to load on a phone. The cause was full-size photos straight from a camera and twenty-eight plugins. Images resized, plugins cut to six, moved to better hosting, and it came back under two seconds.

A typical example: a domain still registered in a former web designer's account, with the business unable to change anything. Ownership recovered and moved into an account the owner controls, with auto-renewal and a contact address someone reads.

Another typical job: contact form submissions that were never arriving because the host's mail was being rejected on authentication. Rebuilt so they deliver reliably, and tested end to end.

A quieter one: an abandoned WordPress site retired and replaced with fast static pages — nothing to update, nothing to exploit, and hosting costs down to almost nothing.

Questions