Web design and development for Sydney businesses.

Yes, fully. Code lives in your GitHub or GitLab org from day one, content lives in your CMS tenant under your account, and DNS stays under your control. If you ever leave SDS, the only handover is a credentials transfer.

We can, and sometimes do for content-heavy editorial sites, but most marketing sites and web apps are better served by a headless CMS plus Next.js or Astro. Faster, more secure, no plugin update treadmill. We'll tell you which stack fits, not which we prefer.

Lighthouse 95+ across Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO is the launch bar. We run real-user metrics (Core Web Vitals via GA4 or Plausible) post-launch, and quarterly performance reviews are part of the support contract, regressions are tracked and fixed.

WCAG 2.2 AA is the floor for every site we ship. Colour contrast, keyboard navigation, focus management, ARIA semantics, and reduced-motion preferences are tested before launch with axe-core in CI and a manual screen-reader pass.

Hosted in Australia by default, Vercel Sydney edge, AWS ap-southeast-2, or Cloudflare Workers, for data sovereignty and lower latency. Builds and design are delivered by our Sydney-based Australian team, with onsite client meetings nationwide.

Most Sydney marketing sites land between $8,500 and $25,000 for design and build. A simple lead-capture site (5-8 pages, headless CMS, fast hosting, on-brand visual design) typically costs $8,500 to $12,500. A mid-market marketing site (15-25 pages, custom design system, integrations, multilingual or multi-region setup) typically costs $15,000 to $25,000. Custom web applications start around $25,000 and scale by feature scope, integrations, and security requirements. Every quote is fixed-price; we do not bill T&M for marketing sites.

The Australian market spans roughly $3,000 (template-shop Squarespace) to $50,000+ (custom enterprise builds). Mid-market business sites tend to land $8,000 to $25,000. Anything under $5,000 is typically a template with brand colours swapped; anything over $50,000 is usually a custom application with integrations, not a marketing site. The deciding factors are: how custom the design is, how many integrations you need (CRM, payments, ERP, marketing automation), and how performance / accessibility-strict the launch criteria are.

One: prioritise user experience (clear navigation, minimal friction, predictable behaviour). Two: design mobile-first (most Australian SMB site traffic is mobile). Three: speed and performance (Core Web Vitals; Lighthouse 95+). Four: clear branding and visual consistency (so people know who they are dealing with). Five: design for conversions (every page has a purpose; CTAs are unmistakable). The SDS launch bar covers all five before we ship.

Shared hosting (cheapest, multiple sites on one server, slowest), VPS (virtual private server, dedicated resources at lower cost), dedicated hosting (one server per customer, highest performance but most expensive to manage), and cloud hosting (resources scale on demand; what most modern sites use, including SDS-built ones). For SDS marketing-site clients we default to cloud edge hosting (Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, or AWS Sydney) because it gives the fastest global performance with predictable cost.

Creativity, Consistency, Clarity, Content, Continuity, Compatibility, and Customisation. Creativity gets attention. Consistency builds trust. Clarity removes friction. Content drives the value exchange. Continuity keeps the visual language coherent across pages. Compatibility ensures the site works across devices, browsers, and assistive tech. Customisation tailors the experience to the visitor or segment. The SDS design process treats them as a checklist, not a philosophy.

Marketing sites (most common, lead generation focus), e-commerce sites (Shopify-native or Stripe-on-Next.js), customer portals and dashboards, internal tools and admin interfaces, multi-tenant SaaS interfaces, and content / editorial sites with heavy CMS workflows. We avoid the cookie-cutter template-shop space; if you need a $1,500 brochure site, that is not the right fit for us.

For a good marketing site (custom design, fast hosting, accessible, ongoing support, owner-controlled CMS), the realistic floor is $8,500. For a custom web application with integrations, the realistic floor is $25,000. Below those numbers you are buying a template with brand colours, not a custom build. Above those numbers depends on scope; we quote fixed-price after a discovery call.