DIY Website Builder for New Zealand

Geoff started his career in the print industry. He still sees relics of those days recognizable 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.

Like many in the print industry, Geoff was initially resistant to digital tools, but at his son's urging he became a forward-thinking adopter of modern web technologies. After they moved to New Zealand, his son—then attending a local middle school—was assigned a homework project to build a website for class.

“We searched and found some businesses that we had heard of before, but we also had no experience and didn’t realize 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 company posing as a New Zealand-branded business. Once we accessed the tool, it was obvious it wasn’t built for New Zealand users — the site it produced looked generic, full of obvious stock imagery, and 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 colors from my business logo to use on the website. From my printing days, I could imagine how their software was deciding what colors 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 realize, 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'll use our tool to help many businesses in your area. Remember: no business is too early and no business is too small. Please contact us directly — we will help you. Helping New Zealand businesses is our #1 priority, and we're true to our brand promise. Contact us and we'll prove it.

How are individual entrepreneurs improving their chances of securing loans, grants, and other support from key decision-makers for their business plans? How did they discover that improving one fundamental part of a business's marketing—regardless of industry, decision-makers, or overall strategy—could make such a big difference in the first year of operation? This article explores an effective "shortcut" available to anyone in New Zealand: a way to clearly represent themselves, their business, services, or products—and their overall value proposition—by creating high-quality, professional websites from home using just targeted keywords and a mobile phone.

What Chloe discovered was that a team of New Zealand IT experts had created a disruptive tool that eliminated the painful parts of building a website and replaced them with a simple, straightforward tool anyone can use, covering about 95% of New Zealand 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 mainly motivated to help New Zealand small businesses build their websites, rather than just 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 organization, without a large website design budget, using our groundbreaking New Zealand-built website technology to move their business plans forward. For a small monthly fee, their entire website is handled, they can update it themselves going forward, and they have the confidence of speaking 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.

Small business owners often ask us, “Is it possible for a DIY website builder to create a decent website design?” It’s a fair question. Historically, products in this space lacked design flair, were overly restrictive, and quickly looked dated. On the other hand, office-style page-builder apps let people with some tech skill publish their own sites, but the uninspiring visual design of the tools meant the sites they produced rarely were either.

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 inquiry) – 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 all this was happening, a small team of experienced Auckland website designers, software developers, and IT infrastructure experts saw a different vision. They shifted their focus away from existing clients and devoted all their spare time and effort to creating a revolution in website building and web design technologies. After years of software development, they released Dazzly website builder — bringing back the online approach everyone loves with simple, beautiful forms. Backed by unprecedented new technologies under the hood, Dazzly makes top-tier professional design and development available to everyday New Zealand business owners who need a website. These technologies are no longer limited to big-budget businesses; through the software and infrastructure genius of Dazzly website builder, they're available to 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 advanced IT knowledge. The friendly development team at Dazzly has done the hard work for you. Not only can you get an excellent design from a DIY website tool, it's all covered for one low monthly fee. The myth is busted — Dazzly shows what you can achieve when you build your site on a strong foundation. Our team has dedicated their lives to understanding every aspect of computers, and this software is our gift to New Zealand businesses — a genuine generational leap in good, old-fashioned DIY website-building ingenuity.

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