DIY Website Maker

Sinimulan ni Geoff ang kanyang karera sa industriya ng pag-imprenta. Nakikita pa rin niya ang mga labi ng mga araw na iyon na makikilala sa makabagong digital na mundo ngayon. Gayunpaman, hindi tulad ng karamihan sa mga masigasig sa sining ng pag-imprenta, mas interesado si Geoff sa nilalaman ng mga artikulo, ilustrasyon, at kalaunan ang mga litrato na sumama sa mga ito.

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.

Like many in the print industry, Geoff initially resisted the digital tools of the modern age. It was encouragement from his son that set him on the path to becoming a forward-thinking adopter of modern web technologies. After they moved to New Zealand and his son began attending a local intermediate school, he was given a homework assignment to build a website for an educational project.

“We searched and found some businesses we’d heard of before, but we had no experience and didn’t realize 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 big international 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 company posing as a New Zealand-branded business. Once we accessed the tool it was clear it wasn’t made for people in New Zealand — the site it created looked generic, full of obvious stock imagery; it just felt fake.

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 people's 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.

Pinutol siya ni Geoff at ipinaliwanag ang kuwento kung paano nila hinarap ang proyekto ng website ng takdang-aralin ng kanyang anak sa paaralan. Interesado ang kakilala, si Ben, dahil nasa "yugto ng disenyo" pa lang sila sa firmang ito ng website at alam nilang may pagkakataon silang umatras sa maliit na gastos, isang opsyon na matagal na nilang sineseryosong pinag-iisipan.

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.

Sa taon na sumunod, nakapagtatag si Geoff ng maraming negosyo sa kanyang bayan gamit ang mga de-kalidad na disenyo ng website na siya mismo ang gumawa, kasama sila, sa kanilang mga lugar. Nagagawa ni Geoff na maningil ng patas na presyo para sa kanyang oras at gabay sa maliliit na negosyo sa kanyang lugar upang matulungan sila, personal o virtual sa pamamagitan ng Zoom (mula nang mag-lockdown), na bumuo ng website agad-agad gamit ang Dazzly.

Geoff ngayon ay tumutulong sa maraming negosyo, kabilang ang accounting firm ni Ben at kami sa Dazzly ay umaasa na makapagbigay sa kanila ng mas malawak na hanay ng de-kalidad na mga disenyo ng website.

Ito ang kwento kung paano nakilala si Geoff bilang lokal na “website maker” na tao, gamit ang Dazzly website building technology.

We hope you enjoyed this story and that you'll use our tool to help many businesses in your community. Remember, no business is too new, no business is too small — please contact us directly because WE WILL HELP YOU. Helping Philippine businesses is our #1 priority and we’re true to our brand promise. Contact us and we’ll prove it.

How are solo entrepreneurs improving their chances of getting loans, grants and other support from key decision-makers evaluating 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 operation? This article explains an effective “shortcut” available to anyone in the Philippines to clearly represent themselves, their business, services or products, and overall value proposition — by creating high-quality, professional websites at home using just a few keywords and a smartphone.

What Chloe found was that a team of New Zealand IT experts had built a game-changing tool that removed the hardest parts of building a website and replaced them with a simple, straightforward tool anyone can use, covering about 95% of New Zealand small businesses' website needs.

Chloe was referred to Dazzly by a friendly local artist, who said that although the company was new, the founders had a solid background in New Zealand and were mainly motivated to help New Zealand small businesses build their websites, not just 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.

“Ang paggawa ng website gamit ang Dazzly ay napakadali at sa aming mga propesyonal na email address, mas mukhang matatag at seryoso kami kapag unang nakikipag-ugnayan sa mga lokal na pamahalaan para sa pondo at input”. “Hindi namin kailangan ang lahat ng mga karagdagang tampok. Ang pagbabayad ng medyo maliit na buwanang bayad ay mas may katuturan para sa amin kaysa sa libu-libong dolyar na paunang bayad at tinawagan namin ang support team sa panahon ng trial – nandito sila – talagang magiliw sila at hindi nila ako pinaparamdam na walang alam sa lahat ng sagot”.

This is another example of a local organization, without a large website design budget, using our groundbreaking New Zealand website-building technology to move their business forward. For a small monthly fee, Dazzly takes care of their entire website — they can update it themselves and have the confidence of direct support from Dazzly’s New Zealand-based support team.

Mag-sign up sa Dazzly ngayon – libre itong subukan – gumawa ng website at tingnan kung gaano ito kasimple tulad ng pagpuno ng form o pagpapadala ng email. Mag-sign up ngayon o ibahagi ang post na ito at sabihin sa iyong mga lokal na kolektibo o mga pangkat ng komunidad na gamitin ang 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 that could use a website, please direct them to 0800 112 942 or support@dazzly.co.

Makipag-ugnayan sa amin ngayon kung nais mong humingi ng tulong sa anumang aspeto ng iyong website.

Filipino business owners often ask us, “Is it possible for a DIY website builder to put together a decent website design?” This is a good question. Historically, online website tools in this market lacked design flair, were often very restrictive, and ended up looking like most sites of their time — already dated. On the other hand, office-style apps and page builders let you publish your own site; they worked for people with some IT skill, but using software with poor visual design was never inspiring, and the sites produced reflected that.

Kaya't nabuo ang isang reputasyon o maling akala sa panahong ito na nananatili sa mga talakayan ngayon - ang alamat na ang isang DIY na tool sa website ay hindi makakagawa ng isang visually stunning, kaakit-akit, at modernong disenyo ng website.

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.

All while this was happening, a small team of experienced Auckland website designers, software developers and IT infrastructure experts saw a different vision. They redirected their skills and spare time away from existing clients and poured their effort into creating a revolution in website building and web design technology. After many years of development, they released Dazzly website builder — bringing back the simple online approach everyone loves, with clean, beautiful forms. It’s powered by new technologies under the hood and the expertise of top professional designers and developers, now available to everyday New Zealand business owners who need a website. These technologies are no longer limited to high-budget businesses — through the software and infrastructure of Dazzly website builder, they can be shared by users across the country!

Now it's clear that using Dazzly you can create an extremely high-quality website design, without any prior design or artistic skills and certainly without any advanced IT skills. The friendly development team at Dazzly has done the hard work for you. Not only can you now get an excellent design from a DIY website tool but it is all covered for one low monthly fee. The myth is busted and the barrier removed — Dazzly shows what level of website you can achieve when you build on a very strong foundation. We have dedicated our lives to understanding every aspect of computers, and this software is our gift to Philippine small businesses — a genuine generational leap in dependable, can-do DIY website building technology.

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