Web Design Agencies near you

The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 is Commonwealth law and makes it unlawful to discriminate against a person on the ground of disability in areas including the provision of goods, services and facilities. A website through which an Australian business offers its services is part of how it provides them, and a site that a blind customer cannot use to make a booking is a live issue rather than a theoretical one.

The practical standard the industry works to is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which are published internationally and used across Australian government and corporate procurement. Ask which conformance level the agency is building to and how it will be checked, because accessibility added after launch costs far more than accessibility designed in.

The basics carry most of the benefit: real text instead of text baked into images, meaningful alternative text, colour contrast that survives sunlight on a phone, forms whose fields are properly labelled, captions on video, and a site that can be operated entirely with a keyboard. None of those makes the design worse.

Enquiry forms, accounts, chat widgets, analytics and advertising pixels all collect information about people. Where your business is covered by the Privacy Act, the Australian Privacy Principles govern how that information is collected, used, disclosed and secured, and the site needs a privacy policy that describes what actually happens rather than a template copied from another business.

Coverage is worth checking rather than assuming. The Privacy Act reaches businesses with an annual turnover of more than 3 million Australian dollars in any financial year since 2002, and also reaches health service providers, businesses that trade in personal information, Commonwealth contracted service providers and businesses related to a covered body corporate regardless of turnover. A small business can also choose to opt in.

If the Act applies, so does the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme. A breach of a site database that is likely to result in serious harm has to be notified to affected individuals and the OAIC, and the assessment of a suspected breach has to be completed within 30 calendar days where reasonably possible. Ask the agency where the database sits, who can reach it, and how backups are stored.

A real project starts with what the site has to achieve and who it is for, then a sitemap and page-by-page content plan. Content is the bottleneck on almost every Australian web project, because the client has to supply it and usually underestimates how long that takes. Decide early whether the agency is writing it.

Design and build follow, ideally with a staging site you can click through on your own phone. Ask to see it on a mid-range Android device on a mobile connection, not only on a designer's laptop.

Before launch, the checklist matters: redirects from every old address, forms tested end to end with a real email arriving, analytics working, accessibility checked, backups configured, and a written record of every account and password handed over. Agree who is on call in the week after launch.

A site built on a content management system needs its core, themes and plugins updated, and unmaintained sites are how small Australian businesses end up serving malware to their own customers. Decide whether the agency maintains it, whether you do, or whether nobody does, and write it down.

Backups should be automatic, stored somewhere other than the server they back up, and tested by actually restoring one. A backup nobody has ever restored is a hope, not a plan.

Ask what a maintenance agreement covers and what it does not. Plugin updates and security patching are not the same as content changes, and content changes are not the same as new features. Unclear maintenance scope is one of the more common sources of disputes between Australian businesses and their web agencies.