DIY Australian Website Builder

Geoff started his career in the print industry. He still sees relics of those days recognisable in today’s digital developed world. However, unlike the majority of those who were enthusiastic about the printing press craft, Geoff was more concerned with the content of the articles, illustrations and eventually the photos that came to accompany them.

With an additional passion for illustrations and artistic pursuits, Geoff established himself as the go-to guy for local illustration and graphic design work. From small drawings and conceptual sketches, through to comical and sometimes even portrait drawings. Geoff is a natural craftsman, and the word was spreading.

Although, like most in the print industry, Geoff was initially resistant to digital tools, it was encouragement from his son that set him on the path to becoming a forward-thinking adopter of modern web technologies. After moving to New Zealand, his son, who was attending a local intermediate school, was given a homework assignment to build a website for educational purposes.

“We searched and found some businesses that we’d heard of before, but we had zero experience and didn’t realise that I would need existing graphic design and computer skills.” Because we knew businesses here in New Zealand had been having a hard time, we wanted to use a local website builder — we didn’t have global ambitions and we knew if we got stuck someone here in New Zealand would be on the other end of the phone. “Needless to say, we were pretty competitive for a homework assignment,” Geoff adds.

The first software we tried was a multinational posing as an Australian‑branded business. Once we started using the tool it was obvious it wasn’t made for Australians — the website it produced looked generic and fake, packed with obvious stock imagery.

Then, towards the end of an evening, Geoff stumbled upon Dazzly website builder. “The process of getting started was very simple and I loved how it took the colours from my business logo to use on the website. From my printing days, I could imagine how their software was deciding what colours to use, it was genuinely innovative, it intrigued me”. Within two evenings, Geoff and Tidus would have their website up and running with Dazzly.

Having successfully presented the website design to his class and receiving a good score, Geoff put his short stint as a website maker behind him and continued his daily routine but deep down he knew that he should be considering changes if he wanted to keep ahead, but like most peoples’ lives, Geoff got busy again.

Many months later Geoff was at a function at a local alehouse and an acquaintance of his was discussing the hassle and trouble that colleagues at his office had when their website was upgraded and re-developed by a small business website design outfit. He complained of them using a lot of modern lingo on top of all the technical lingo one would unfortunately expect to encounter. Clearly there were some staffing issues which was causing communication issues and stalling the project, they clearly weren’t having a good time by having to repeat themselves to new people at every meeting.

Geoff interrupted him and explained the story of how they had tackled his son’s school homework website project. The acquaintance, Ben, was interested, as they were still in the “design stage” with this website firm and knew that there was an opportunity to back out at minimal cost, an option they had already been seriously considering.

Ben preferred to use a tablet computer due to his eye-sight, so he pulled it out from his bag and loaded the Dazzly website. They found a copy of Ben’s accounting firm logo in his Inbox and uploaded that into Dazzly. Within 15 minutes and a glass of tap beer they had completed the draft website design and published a preview URL for them to privately review. “That is when I began to realise, I might be on to something here. I had just produced a real result, meeting a real small business need, with minimal time and effort, really only a small amount of content and a logo graphic. This was a real problem being faced by businesses here and probably across the country”.

After watching some motivational videos and building up a bit of courage. The next morning Geoff started cold-calling local businesses in his area, that were often without websites nor had the capability to build their own (as far as they knew). While the first warm-up calls weren’t perfect, within a small amount of time people were warming to the idea and by mid-day he had several productive conversations with local businesses. Within a week he had meetings lined-up with several businesses. His suspicions were seemingly being confirmed by their stories of dealing with other providers and platforms.

In the year that followed, Geoff was able to establish many businesses in his town with high-quality website designs that he made himself, with them, at their premises. Geoff is able to charge a fair price for his time and guidance to small businesses in his area to help them, in-person or virtually over Zoom (since the lockdown), to build a website on-the-spot with Dazzly.

Geoff now helps many businesses, including Ben’s accounting firm and we at Dazzly look forward to being able to provide them with an even greater range of high quality website designs.

This is the story about how Geoff became known as the local “website maker” man, using Dazzly website building technology.

We hope you enjoyed this story and that you can use our tool to help many businesses in your local area. No business is too early, no business is too small — please contact us directly; we will help you. Helping New Zealand businesses is our #1 priority, and we stand by our brand promise. Contact us and we’ll prove it.

How have individual entrepreneurs improved their ability to secure loans, grants and other support from key decision-makers in their business plans? How did they discover that improving one fundamental part of their business's marketing — regardless of industry, decision-makers or overall plan — could make such a big difference in their first year of trading? This article outlines an effective "shortcut" accessible to anyone in Australia: a way to professionally represent themselves, their business, services or products and overall value proposition — by making high-quality, professional websites available to anyone at home with just their keywords and a mobile phone.

What Chloe discovered was that a team of IT experts had created a disruptive tool that removed the painful parts of building a website and replaced them with a simple, straightforward tool anyone can use, covering around 95% of small business website needs.

Chloe was referred to Dazzly by a friendly local artist, who said that although the company was new, the founders had a strong background in New Zealand and were primarily motivated to help New Zealand small businesses build their websites, rather than simply to make a profit.

By skipping all the time-consuming meetings, expensive up-front deposits (or in some cases the entire website project cost up-front), Chloe, like many other local artists and entrepreneurs, has been able to design, develop and publish their own website to represent their business plan.

“Making a website with Dazzly was a breeze and with our professional email addresses we also come across much more established and serious when we first reach out to local governments for funding and input”. “We never needed all the bells and whistles. Paying a comparatively small monthly fee makes much more sense to us than thousands of dollars up-front and we called the support team during the trial – they’re based here – they’re really friendly and don’t make me feel silly for not knowing all the answers”.

This is another example of a local organisation, without a large website design budget, using our groundbreaking Kiwi website-making technology to propel their business plans forward. For a small monthly fee, their entire website is taken care of; they can update it themselves going forward, and they have the confidence and support of having spoken directly with Dazzly’s New Zealand-based support team.

Sign up to Dazzly today – it is free to try – create a website and see how it is as simple as filling out a form or sending an email. Sign up today or share this post and tell your local collectives or community groups to use Dazzly.

Dazzly is for everyone – we also help churches, restaurants, donation stores, charities, incorporated societies, researchers and other hard-working New Zealand groups build websites. If you know a group in need, please direct them to 0800 112 942 or support@dazzly.co.

Contact us now if you would like to assistance with any aspect of your website.

Australian business owners often ask us, “Is it possible for a DIY website builder to produce a decent website design?” It’s a fair question. Historically, online software offered in this market lacked design flair, was often very restrictive and produced sites that already looked dated. At the other end, office-style applications and page builders let people publish their own sites — they worked for those with a bit more tech skill, but software with poor visual design was never inspiring, and the sites created reflected that.

Hence a reputation or misconception developed during this time that has persisted into todays discussions - the myth that a DIY website tool could not make a visually stunning, appealing and modern website design.

This myth was further advanced by the second generation of companies that offered more online website creation tools, often resorting to static underlying website layouts but with the ability to drag-and-drop content overtop – with little restriction. In the case of users that had existing graphic design and artistic abilities, they were able to put together websites that were on-par or exceeding those made by professional website designers at the time. So, for a time that myth was fading, but due to the ever-advancing speed of technologies, particularly website development languages, that once again these businesses once again found themselves behind the web design trend that perpetually marched forward.

Then things began to stagnate. The myth perpetuated and no businesses entered the market, no development was spurred, and although there were some quality ecommerce making software being developed at this time, no-one was advancing the front-end or professional website design templates. There had been a strong shift of interest from online DIY web systems towards offline content management system (CMS) based systems. These required a small amount of skill in a few areas of IT (all of which could be acquired from a few days researching and purchasing time with a low-budget website hosting provider) and these were, sufficient, for the time-being it seemed.

Not much innovation was made in this space, users as well as aspiring and budding website designers, artists and entrepreneurs all flocked to using such content management systems despite their requirement for some IT skill and training. The website designs were very rigid and putting in addons or further requirements was often time-consuming, painful and expensive. Content management systems were very limiting and although these aspirational web businesses thought they were delivering top-notch work it was more a case of ‘good enough’ and in some cases ‘infuriating’ to the business owners who did not like these solutions. They did not like the difficulty of updating their website and did not like the constant failings of their website going offline or error messages encountered by their customers when completing common tasks (such as submitting a website enquiry) – all in all, they weren’t happy and the new web businesses didn’t see a problem with it. So nothing changed. What do you expect when you try to build something fancy with extra features on a poor foundation – just like a house – it won’t be a great finish.

While this was happening, a small team of experienced website designers, software developers and IT infrastructure experts saw a different vision. They pooled their skills, shifted their efforts away from existing clients and spent every spare moment developing a revolution in website creation and web design technologies. After years of development they released Dazzly website builder — bringing back the online approach everyone loves, with simple yet beautiful-looking forms. It’s backed by unprecedented new technologies under the hood — bringing top-tier professional website designers and developers within reach of everyday Australian business owners who need a website. These technologies were no longer limited to high-budget businesses, but through the software and infrastructure ingenuity of Dazzly website builder they can be shared by users across the country!

Now it's clear that with Dazzly you can create an extremely high-quality website design, without any prior design or artistic skills and certainly without any advanced IT knowledge. The friendly development team at Dazzly have done the hard work for you. Not only can you get an excellent design from a DIY website tool but it's all covered for one low monthly fee. The myth has been debunked — Dazzly shows what you can achieve when you build your website on a solid foundation. Our team have dedicated their lives to understanding every aspect of computing, and this software is our gift to small businesses, a genuine leap forward in practical DIY website-building technology.

Try Dazzly today – free to try, 100% NZ-owned.