Brisbane’s web design experts

We’re now in a digital-first world where online experiences are driving sales, followers and engagement like never before. We help brands build websites that communicate clearly, stand out, and sell more.

Our main goal is to create an experience that communicates directly with your target audience and gets them engaged with your website.

image of James Roberts
James Roberts

Brisbane Web Design Expert

We work with great companies of all shapes and sizes

Build your website in Brisbane

We’re a Brisbane digital marketing agency that grows your online presence and that all starts with building a new website. Your website is truly the gateway to getting your more leads and more sales. You can improve your social media presence, pop in some changes to improve SEO and update your blog regularly, but unless you have a good website, many of these changes lose most of their effectiveness. 

Think of a website as the foundation for your online presence. You create a social media presence to drive traffic to your website. You create a Google My Business page, to drive traffic to your website. You create blogs and send emails, to direct traffic to your website. Are you seeing a theme here? If you’re doing any online marketing of your business, you’re directing traffic to your website, so of course you’ll want it to be the best representation of your business. You’re not spending all this time creating a brilliant product or service, for people to discover it and not click through because your website design is tacky and outdated. The future of your business starts with having a functional and usable website.

How we design and build websites

At Sonder, we’ve developed a process for designing and developing our websites and we’ve selected the right tools to help us on this process. There are so many website building, designing and monitoring tools available, it can be overwhelming. We’ve tried and tested a few out so that we can get the best results for our community. We’re so confident in the tools that we use, that we’ve designed and built our website using them. 

With every tool we use, we want it to be accessible. We don’t want to burden or lock in our clients with contracts or overly complicated websites. We create websites to be used. You should be able to upload a new image to your website or add a new blog without needing to get your digital marketing agency on the phone. You should be able to do this without needing to take a few courses on coding just to be able to find the section to upload an image. So when we build a website, we’re always thinking about how you’ll use it. A new website should free you to do the business you want to rather than locking you into a series of back and forths between yourself and the designer.

Did you know that 42% of all websites are built on WordPress? There’s a good reason why WordPress has such a wide reach across the internet and that’s because it’s an excellent web builder. It caters for websites of all types and has a huge variety of templates to choose from. We love using WordPress for a few reasons. The largest reason being, it lets us use lots of plugins. WordPress has a really great base functionality, but with plugins, you can really extend the use of this web app to bend it in whichever way you want it. We use a few plugins to do everything from building out your shop, optimising for SEO, updating your blog and much much more. 

We also love WordPress because it’s incredibly usable and not just for us! We’ve spoken a bit about this already, but we’re really passionate about putting you in the driver’s seat of your own website. Some digital marketing agencies put together a beautiful website, with stunning design and great functionality, but when you go to add in a picture or make an edit, the whole design crumbles. Some digital marketing agencies will also hand you a website which is just composed of code and that’s just simply not usable. We love using WordPress because our clients can navigate the back end and can understand how to make changes and where to make them.

So you know how we were just talking about how much we loved building websites on WordPress because the plugins were so great? Well we use a fair few plugins with WordPress, but Elementor is our absolute favorite, there’s simply no comparison. Elementor has a community of over 8 million users worldwide and allows them to create beautiful websites with tonnes of widgets to use. With its extensive API, there aren’t many plugins that Elementor can’t integrate with. 

Elementor works seamlessly with WordPress to provide a playground of opportunities for your new website. We design specifically for Elementor so that we can build you a beautiful website that is functional. One of the great things about working with Sonder is that our design team is also trained in building websites, so when they’re designing your new site, they’re not designing for the impossible. Everything that we promise you in your designs, we can build because we’ve taken the time to master the tools we use.

If you’ve been on the internet, you would have heard about Adobe. They have the most comprehensive create suite available to date. We use XD, Photoshop and illustrator to design and craft the visuals for your website. These are best in range tools and are constantly updating and evolving to move with the changing capabilities of the internet. We love using these tools because they allow us to send you designs that we’re working on in real time so that you can leave us feedback. This allows you to see what we’re working on and view our website designs as they’ll appear when we build them. It also means that we’re able to perfect and build visuals for you that align to your business and brand.

We’ve talked a bit about why we create websites that are accessible for you. But that doesn’t mean that our interaction has to end as soon as your website is done. Of course we’re happy to hand over your new website to you but we’re also happy to keep up the maintenance and create content for your new website. One of the best ways to help your ongoing SEO is to consistently upload new content to your website. This could mean the creation of a monthly blog, perhaps creating new landing pages or just regularly refreshing the content on your web pages. 

Google is constantly updating the algorithm that it uses to rank websites on search results. That means that businesses have to be agile and constantly on top of what the latest SEO trend is. This can be quite a burden on business managers who are already busy enough managing their business, so of course Sonder is happy to help out and update where necessary. Ongoing support and maintenance to your website is one of the best ways that you can rest assured knowing that your business is making the best use of SEO updates and staying relevant in your communities searches.

We build on WordPress, so all websites we create are secured. We make sure that all of our websites are SSL certified under WordPress. An SSL certificate means that it’s operating on an encrypted connection so that all data that’s passed between the user and the website is kept private and secure. This encryption can help to prevent hackers from obtaining private information such as bank details, logins, addresses, email accounts or anything else that a website is asking from you.

WordPress performs daily automatic backups that are encrypted in transit and at rest. They’re stored in off-site data centers so that you can access them if need be, this is useful if your website is ever compromised and you need to access previous records or designs. All WordPress sites have complex passwords enforced and you can add a layer of security with multi-factor authentication technology. We always recommend using multi-factor authentication so that if in the very rare occurrence that someone is trying to access your website, you’ll get the notification that someone is trying to get in and put a halt on any access that shouldn’t be granted.

Protect your website from distributed denial of service attack, also known as a DDoS with Cloudflare CDN that’s automatically installed on all of our websites. This means that if your service is ever a target for malicious attempts to disrupt your traffic then there’s a safeguard in place.

We use Ahrefs to help you improve your SEO. This tool allows us to scour the web to see how other websites are using keywords to rank better on search engines. It also shows us how many backlinks you’ll need to rank on search results for certain keywords. If a website exists, Ahrefs can provide an organic traffic and paid traffic report as well as a backlink profile. This helps when we’re benchmarking your business against others and allows us to focus on what SEO strategy we’ll need when we create your new website. 

Ahrefs is also incredibly useful for monitoring your traffic inflow as your new website is launched or even a new webpage. When changes are made to your website sometimes the results can happen over night as you see the rankings jump and traffic inflow increasing rapidly. Ahrefs can help explain what in particular about the change worked so you can replicate it across your website and watch your business grow.

Creating a website for Spot Therapy

A bit about Spot Therapy

Spot Therapy delivers excellence in speech therapy with their 100% telehealth service. They’ve been in operation for over 5 years and pride themselves on being consistent and reliable. Spot Therapy came to us after a recent rebrand, looking to build a website that was easy to navigate, reflected the services that they provided and showed off their new rebranded visuals. Given that their service is completed 100% online, it was important to consider how people would access the right information and what they would need to book in a session. A common misconception about online therapy is that it can be a sterile interaction, so Spot wanted to showcase each of their speech therapists and humanise their business to make them more approachable. 

Spot also wanted a website that would be usable to them, it was important that they’d be able to update with new staff and include new services when they were available.

picture of a spot therapist on a zoom call with a patient
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How we helped

We designed and built a website for Spot Therapy that reflected their rebrand and showcased their speech therapists in action. We organised for our photographer to get plenty of content of the speech therapists weaving their magic and conducting their service online. Then we made sure to include all of these fantastic shots into the new website and into their relevant services. We also created some copy around their services and optimised it to get traction in search results. 

We made the website fully accessible for Spot, so when updates and changes needed to be made, they were able to jump in and make some quick changes rather than going through a laborious process. When websites are just composed of code, it can be difficult to make quick changes unless you know the code language. That’s why we always use website builders, so that our clients are never locked out of their own website.

picture of a spot therapist and her patient

The results

Spot therapy has been doing incredible work all across Australia. With their new website they’ve been able to continue to grow their community and hire more speech therapists. Their new website positioned them as leaders in the industry and showcased the individual therapists, so people knew who they were signing up for when making an appointment. Because their new website was completely accessible, the team at Spot have updated their website to reflect their growing team and services.

image of the spot therapy website on an iPhone 12

Why web design is important

Your website is your online storefront. Much like an in-person store, you want people to be directed in the right direction so they can find and buy what they’re looking for. User experience (UX) is necessary for a positive website interaction. If you’re looking to hire a plumber for a quick fix, and you keep being directed to pages that aren’t relevant to immediately booking, you’ll probably get annoyed with the constant redirections and opt for a service that has an easy to use interface. This is why website design is so important to getting a good user experience. 

You want people who land on your website to have a positive experience. This is where the power of design comes in. A great example of how design can transform an experience is when you’re trying to make a purchase. A bad experience will take you through one page to confirm your order, one page to enter your home address, one page to enter your card details, and another page to place your order. This is a four-step process, but why not make it a one-page process? Good design lessens the time and effort it takes to action a process.

image of the Blended Interiors & Design website on an iPhone 12
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How websites deliver leads

If your website is easy to navigate, has enticing copy and stunning visuals, then of course people will be more likely to engage with it over a website that is lacking on all of these fronts. People are on your website and searching for services related to your business because they’re looking to find a solution. They’re on your website because they know that your product or service could be what they need. A good website will convey the message that you can solve their problems in a quick and easy-to-digest manner. 

For us at Sonder, a website is more than just the framework that pictures and copy are inserted into. A website is equal parts copy, design and visuals, it all blends into one seamless experience. With each of these facets, we also consider SEO, so that your website is showing up for those searching for the right terms. Because we optimise for SEO your website will be ranking highly in search results and because you’ve invested in developing a website that’s easy to navigate, enjoyable to read, and aesthetically pleasing, prospective customers are much more likely to engage.

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Web design for SEO

By considering SEO in design, copy and visuals rather than its own separate entity, it means that we’re able to optimise each element to get recognised by search engines rather than popping in quick fixes at the end. SEO is ingrained in every aspect of our web design, and this is how we make your website show up on search engines to grow your business with more leads. 

So how do we do it? It all starts with a simple google search, when you type in a particular phrase into Google or Bing, they want to find the best result possible for you. Search engines do this by looking at a whole range of metrics, like the number of words on a page that match to your search, how long people spend on the page, how far they scroll down, how relevant the image tags are, how many pages your website has, and the list goes on and on! This is why it’s so important to consider SEO with every aspect of your web design, it’s the only way that you can rest assured knowing that you’re doing the most that you can to get your business showing up where it needs to be in front of the people looking for your brand.

Let’s build your new website

Put your website on the first page of google and watch as clicks turn into sales. Our websites are built to get you results and to reflect your unique brand. Our designers and developers are ready to grow your business today.

Indy Lynch and Tom Holliday from Sonder

What websites do we design?

With different business types there are always different types of websites. You would never create a website for a restaurant in the same way that you’d create a website for an electrician. There are nuances to industry but with Sonder that delves deeper. We look to see how websites differ inside the industry to give yours an edge. We’re not about creating the same old boring designs, we want to take the industry standard and improve on it. 

People rarely look for the same old service, they want to be wined and dined. Create a website that’s not only relevant to your industry, but that sets the benchmark higher. We became a digital marketing agency that specialises in web design because we wanted to enable businesses to be the very best that they can be, and often the only things that are missing are the customers. We always love a challenge, and whatever your business is, we’d be excited to design and build your next website.

image of the Newstead Dental Co website on a Macbook Pro

If you’re in the healthcare industry, you’ll know how important it is to have a website that accurately reflects what services you provide with a certain human touch. When it comes to people’s health, people want a bit more of human touch. It’s always so important to have pictures and bios of your healthcare practitioners so that people on your website can best understand your people. Providing that information will help people feel more connected to your business and more likely to opt for your service over one that doesn’t have that human element. 

At Sonder we’ve built plenty of healthcare websites that have grown the outreach of these services. We’ve been pivotal in positioning their brand as an authority in their industry and perfecting their messaging so they can promote their cause to the right community. We know what it takes to make your healthcare website the most accurate reflection of your business that’s going to get you in front of the people who are looking for your service.

Professional services, trade services, beauty services, interior design services, recruitment services, we could go on, but we think you get the picture. If your business provides a service, then there’s no doubt that you need a solid website. The one thing that all service-based industries have in common when creating a website is that you need solid navigation around what your services are and a succinct description of what your services are. In high competition industries, SEO and messaging are paramount to prioritise when creating a website. 

At Sonder we always make sure to conduct a deep dive into your industry to see what makes it different from others. Because there always is a difference. With service based industries it could be anything from the tone used, what images are commonly used, what graphics are used to position the messaging, how colour is used to emphasise certain aspects, there are always plenty of little details. We use the research to make sure we’re hitting the right mark and prioritising the right messaging around your core messages so that you can watch your traffic increase.

Are you in the food and fun industry? Then you’ll want a website that has spectacular visuals that capture the ambiance of your space and the delectable goods that your service. If you’re a restaurant, you’re going to want a website that stands out from the crowd and truly shows off your individuality. Whether that’s with how you want to position the images of your food and space, or perhaps you’d like no photography and just build a website that leaves those who visit it with questions that can only be answered by a visit. Regardless of what the brief is, we’re here to make it a reality. 

We understand that hospitality websites are a bit different, because we’ve created a fair few. We can help out with not only designing and building a new website for you, but also with creating and designing a menu and marketing collateral that aligns with your brand. We’re also available if you ever need some taste testers to try out your new menu, but there’s no pressure on that one. If it’s creating a booking system, a menu viewer or a gallery for your space, we’re happy to take your dream website and make it a reality.

Universities, schools, tutors, TAFE, and everything in between have a few commonalities with how their websites are designed. A lot of that has to do with what the objective of their website is. Some education providers want to host educational materials on websites, some want websites based around their research, and others want their website to reflect the services that they provide. Whatever the goal is, we find that education providers have high standards of professionalism to maintain and particular branding that has to be maintained throughout the website. 

We’ve created plenty of websites for those in the education industry who are looking for an accessible website that reflects the core of their mission to the audience that needs to see it. Because we use WordPress, we’re able to integrate with many of the plugins used with education providers and provide a seamless experience for not only the staff, but also those who are looking to use the websites.

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Frequently asked questions

To help you make the most informed decision, here are common questions our clients ask us. If you have more questions, you’re welcome to scroll down, fill out the form and we’ll get back to you soon.

This is our most asked question across the board. Unfortunately, we’re not going to be able to give you an exact amount in this answer, but we’re absolutely going to explain why. Creating a website is a fluid process, something as simple as a homepage can be quite simple, or quite complex depending on what you’re looking for. We can create homepages that have animations, scroll effects, and plenty of flair. But we can also create websites that are more focused around a core message and want a different tone away from fanfare. These websites are going to cost different amounts to reflect the time and effort put into designing and building the pages. 

At Sonder, we’re guided by your wants and your budget. If you want a homepage filled with different animations and activations, then that’s going to cost a bit more, and if that’s not in your budget, we’ll work with you to find a design that does. 

So why don’t we provide set prices for each type of website? Because no website that we make is alike, and often when we start designing you’ll start to see the possibilities and will maybe take a different direction. We’re here to listen and move with your business.

How long is a piece of string? The time it takes to build a website is dependent on so many things. We’re more than happy to work to your schedule and produce something fantastic when you want it but there are always a few dependencies. Building a website is a collaborative process, if you want a website with incredible new visuals, your logo featured prominently and plenty of video content but you currently don’t have any of these items or a high-resolution copy of your logo, then it will probably take a little longer. 

We love producing high-quality websites that have brand new photos and stunning videography, but this takes a little bit longer to produce, we need to organise our photographer to come out to do some shots and some filming. We then need to get the content pushed through post production and get it in the right format for your new website. Our websites look the best when we’ve got the best visuals, so getting these sorted sooner rather than later will be the best bet to ensure your website is built as fast as it can be. 

A big dependency is also placed on copy. If you need a new copy for your website, then this will change the timeline of when your website will go live. If you need a copy for just a few pages, then there shouldn’t be too much of an extension, but if you need 15 pages each at 4000 words, then there absolutely will be a bit of a delay in getting this website up and running. 

Regardless of the copy, design, and building requirements for your website, we’re more than happy to talk about timelines and costs with you. Every business we talk to is unique and every website we build reflects this.

We recommend that you refresh or rebuild your homepage every 1-2 years and your full website around every 2-3 years. The internet is always evolving and the standards are constantly changing. Everything with design, build, optimisation for search engines updates constantly. It doesn’t take too long before a website is outdated and it’s purely because the internet is just growing at such a rapid rate.

Regarding maintenance, we use WordPress and Elementor who are consistently updating their code and platform to maintain their relevance with the growth of the internet, so occasionally they’ll make a few changes that update your website and we may need to make a few adjustments to coincide with this. 

With SEO, it’s so important to regularly update your website with new content, page updates, and relevant keywords. This is so you can maintain your search engine ranking and stay in front of the eyes you need to be on Google. 

At Sonder, we create websites so that you can make these updates yourself and feel confident doing so. But we know that you’re busy and may not have the time to do this, so we’re more than happy to update and maintain your website.

Design is design, right? Not always! UX and UI design are often confused, but they are a bit different. UX stands for User Experience and UI stands for User Interface and both of these two design elements should complement each other into one seamless experience. 

UX is how easy people find engaging with your website, it’s how accessible they find your navigation, and how quickly they can get to where they need to be. UI is how engaging they find your visuals, if your pictures are aligned, if the colours flow together well and if it’s easy to look at. You can have a website that’s beautiful but hard to navigate, and you can have an ugly website that’s very easy to navigate, but both of these will leave a bad taste in the user’s mouth. That’s why it’s so important to have UI and UX that compliment each other and work together to create a seamless experience that users love. 

At Sonder, we’re a digital marketing agency that loves to create seamless online experiences. Get to know us more to see how we can elevate your online experience and create unique websites that your community will love to use.

You get an app, you get an app, everyone gets an app! That’s how it is these days right? With the boom in app creation, it seems everyone and their dog has an app coming out, so do you need one? We’re of the opinion that unless your service has an element that can only be delivered with your phone handy then you probably don’t need an app. People don’t like downloading apps for everything, and they especially don’t like being asked to download an app for doing everyday things. 

We’re in the business of creating mobile-friendly websites that people feel comfortable using on their phone. You don’t need an app when people are able to see what you’re about through your phone. It’s never been more important to optimise your website for mobile, especially when most people accessing your website will be doing it from a handheld device.

When developing a website, it’s pretty important to have a domain name but it can be a bit confusing to navigate how they work. A domain is the address of the website that people will see in the URL bar when they’re on your website. To create a website you need a domain name and a web hosting service to make sure that your website is accessible for people to find. You don’t want a website that’s there but not live. 

Domains are a bit like real estate for the web, you can buy and sell domain names and there’s a large market for getting high-quality domain names. If you already have a domain name, we can build a site for it. If you’re looking to get a domain name to start the website process, then we’re happy to help you through the process.

We’re more than happy to help out and host your website. We love making websites that work well and that aren’t compromised with a slow hosting server. Let us host your website so that we can ensure that you’re getting the best load times and that there’s never any substitute for quality. This is because we host with WP engine and we host it locally to Brisbane and Sydney so those accessing your website in these locations and Australia will be able to access your page faster. We prefer to host locally rather than cheaper overseas options because we never want access to your website to be compromised. 

We’re also more than happy to hand over your website so that you can host them on your service. We’ll never gatekeeper your website, we just want to help make your website the best that it can be. Feel free to have a chat with us about hosting options to find the solution that best suits you and your business.

Adapt your strategy through marketing beyond lockdowns

Meet the team

We’re a small team realising big dreams.

the Sonder team 2021

The story of Sonder

Bolstering Brisbane digital for over half a decade.

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Websites

Beautiful design meets best in class development.

SEO

Superpowered growth with meaningful traffic.

Video Production

Storytelling through compelling video content.

Pay Per Click

Campaigns that deliver significant ROI.

Build now. Pay later.

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