This document is the operational version of how I work. Every project follows this pattern unless we agree explicitly to deviate. It's deliberately opinionated — the things I think most Melbourne agencies do badly are named directly. If you read this and disagree with the positions taken, we're probably not a fit, and that's the right outcome for both of us.
1. Who this is for
This methodology is built for Melbourne small businesses with budgets above A$3,200 who want a website that's part of a real marketing programme — not just a brochure with stock photos. The typical client is a service business (trades, clinics, professional services, hospitality) doing A$300k–A$3M in revenue, where the website is genuinely a primary marketing channel and the owner is bought in to growing it.
It is not built for: budget-tier prospects shopping a A$1,500 template site (WebCraft, Havealook and a dozen others do that well — go there), enterprise teams that need an agency with multiple disciplines under one roof, or businesses where the website is a tick-box compliance exercise rather than a growth channel.
If you're somewhere in the middle, the 15-minute discovery call is the cleanest way to figure out if this fits. No pressure, no upsell.
2. The two-week discovery
Every project begins with two weeks of structured discovery before any design or development work starts. This is the single biggest difference between my process and most Melbourne competitors, who jump straight to wireframes after a 30-minute "kickoff" call.
The discovery has three deliverables:
- The marketing brief — who your customer actually is, what they Google before they buy, where current leads come from, what's failed before, and what the next 18 months need to look like. Roughly 8 pages when finished.
- The site map and conversion model — which pages exist, what each page is trying to make the visitor do, where the friction is in the current flow.
- The keyword and content baseline — what your business currently ranks for, what it should rank for, what the realistic 12-month rank trajectory is.
At the end of the two weeks I send you the brief. If at this point you decide the website isn't actually the right next step — maybe you need brand work first, maybe you need a content programme without a rebuild — you walk away owing only the A$480 workshop fee. Project deposit refunded in full. This walk-away clause is unusual in the industry and it's there because the discovery is honest work whether or not it leads to a build.
3. Stack decisions
Stack choice for most clients is binary: Astro on Cloudflare Pages for everything that isn't real e-commerce, Shopify with a custom theme for real product stores. That covers ~95% of small business website needs.
I do not build new WordPress sites. The maintenance burden of a portfolio of WordPress sites is structurally incompatible with a solo operation — plugin conflicts, security patches, hosting platform changes, the inevitable midnight call when something breaks. Larger agencies with maintenance teams run WordPress profitably; a solo operator can't. I am happy to maintain existing WordPress sites for clients on retainer, but I won't take new WordPress builds.
I also do not use Wix, Squarespace, Webflow as the build platform, or page-builders like Elementor and Divi inside WordPress. Each has its place — none of them are it for the work I'm trying to do. The trade-offs are spelled out in the discovery brief if you push on the stack choice.
The downstream consequences of choosing Astro:
- Editing requires me or a developer. Content edits happen through email + the retainer hour, not a janky CMS dashboard. About 80% of clients prefer this trade-off once it's explained; the other 20% are better served elsewhere.
- The hosting cost is essentially zero. Cloudflare Pages free tier covers any realistic SMB traffic. You pay for the domain (~A$20/year) and email (~A$14/month Google Workspace). That's it.
- The site doesn't break by itself. No plugin updates, no security patches, no version pinning. The code I ship continues to work for years without intervention.
- Performance is built in. Astro ships zero JavaScript by default. Lighthouse 95+ is the floor for every site, not the ceiling.
4. The copy framework
Most websites fail at copy, not design. I draft copy before design starts, not after. The discipline is non-negotiable: every page gets written in plain text first, in a shared Google Doc, with you. Design follows the copy, not the other way around.
The three-paragraph structure I use for service pages:
- The problem the visitor came with. Named explicitly, in their language, not yours. Most agency sites lead with "Welcome to [Brand]" — by paragraph one I want the visitor thinking "this is for me."
- What's different about how you solve it. Not features. Not adjectives. The specific decision or approach that makes your version of this service distinct from the next competitor.
- What the next step is. One clear action. Not three CTAs.
For homepage hero copy, the working pattern is: problem → distinct approach → specific deliverables → price → location. Generic agency hero copy gets stripped out — if a sentence could appear on 50 competitor websites, it doesn't appear on yours.
I do not use AI-generated copy as final copy. AI is fine for outlining, fine for first drafts to react against. It's not fine to ship verbatim — prospects can tell, and on a small business site the voice has to feel like a person to convert.
5. SEO from day one
"We'll do SEO after launch" is a sales pattern, not a delivery pattern. Real SEO is design and copy decisions made during the build, not a separate engagement bolted on three months later.
What gets done in the build phase, every project:
- Keyword research and prioritisation as part of the discovery brief
- Page titles, meta descriptions, H1 hierarchy locked at the copy stage
- Schema markup (LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage where relevant)
- Image alt text written by me, not auto-generated
- Open Graph and Twitter card meta on every page
- XML sitemap auto-generated and submitted to Google Search Console
- Canonical URLs locked, redirects mapped from any old domains
- Google Business Profile set up, optimised, and linked
- Performance optimised because Google ranks fast sites better, full stop
The post-launch SEO work — content cadence, ranking improvements, backlink building — happens in the retainer. But the foundation is laid in the build and it's not optional.
6. Performance benchmarks
Every site I ship clears these targets at launch, on mobile, on a throttled 4G connection:
- Lighthouse Performance: 95+ (typically 98–100)
- First Contentful Paint: under 1.0s
- Largest Contentful Paint: under 1.5s
- Cumulative Layout Shift: under 0.05
- Time to Interactive: under 2.0s
The things that get sacrificed to hit these numbers: heavy JavaScript frameworks, third-party chat widgets, embedded video players that auto-load, image carousels, animation libraries used decoratively. None of those things add conversion. Most subtract from it.
The things that don't get sacrificed: design quality, real photography, custom typography, interactive elements that earn their weight. Good design and 100 Lighthouse aren't in tension — most slow sites are slow because of cargo-cult add-ons, not because their design is ambitious.
7. Post-launch reporting
Every project includes a 6-month post-launch reporting cycle. Most Melbourne agencies do not include this. The monthly report covers:
- Search Console performance — queries, clicks, impressions, position changes
- Google Analytics 4 — sessions, top pages, conversion events
- Core Web Vitals from real users (CrUX data)
- Google Business Profile insights — calls, direction requests, photo views
- Ranking position for the agreed priority keywords
- One specific recommendation for the coming month — content, technical, or campaign
At the 3-month mark we have a working call to review whether the assumptions in the discovery brief are holding up. At the 6-month mark we review whether a retainer makes sense — for some clients it absolutely does, for others the launched site does its job without further investment, and I'd rather you not pay me a retainer you don't need.
8. What this methodology rejects
Worth being explicit about the things I refuse to do, because the absences shape the work as much as the presences.
- No AI chatbots on the homepage. They signal "I won't reply personally." That directly undermines the founder-led promise.
- No email-capture popups on first visit. Cargo-cult conversion-rate optimisation from 2018.
- No image carousels in the hero. Engagement near zero, performance cost real, the user can't read text that moves.
- No fake "as featured in" logo strips. If you weren't actually featured there, putting the logo up is a lie that destroys trust when discovered.
- No counter widgets with inflated numbers. "537 projects delivered!" when you've done 12 reads as exactly what it is.
- No AI-generated copy passed off as written. Prospects can tell.
- No animation that exists for the sake of animation. Subtle hover states, fade-up on scroll, page transitions — yes. Bouncing arrows, parallax-everywhere, complex Lottie loops — no.
- No page-builder plugins. Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder. Performance disaster, accessibility disaster, maintenance disaster.
9. What it costs, and why
Pricing is published on the services page. The short version: projects start at A$3,200, the most common build is in the A$3,200–A$5,500 range, and add-ons stack predictably on top. Retainers run A$280–A$1,800/month, month-to-month, no lock-in.
The reason it's priced where it is: this is genuinely a one-person operation. The hours that go into a project — discovery, copy, design, build, SEO, GBP, post-launch reporting — don't compress below a certain floor without quality suffering. The floor pricing of A$3,200 reflects what's actually involved, not what the market thinks the floor should be.
Below that price point, the work isn't worth doing for either of us. Above that price point, every dollar can be accounted for in scope. I'd rather lose a prospect to a A$1,500 template shop than build a A$2,000 corner-cut version of what I do well at A$3,200 — and I'd rather lose an enterprise prospect to a 30-person agency than over-promise capacity I don't have.
If this whole document made you nod, the next step is a 15-minute call. If parts of it made you wince, that's useful data too — name the parts and we can discuss whether the disagreement is a deal-breaker or a productive starting point.