Every so often a call comes in that starts the same way. The website is down, or the online store has stopped taking orders, and the business can’t reach the person who built it. Emails bounce, the phone rings out, and nobody in the office is sure where the site is hosted. Then the questions […]

Give the same AI tool the same job, once from a first-year graduate and once from someone with twenty years in the field, and you’ll get two very different results. Take a builder’s estimator pricing a bathroom renovation from a set of plans. The graduate asks the AI for a cost breakdown and gets a […]

“So where are the designs?” The question came about ten minutes into a pitch, from someone plainly looking forward to this part of the meeting. But what we didn’t have was the audience, the goals, the analytics or any customer research. They hadn’t given us that information, so instead we’d brought a plan, a set […]

A business rang us a fortnight before their new website was due to go live. It wasn’t our build. The designs had been signed off months earlier, the pages were finished, and the thing was in its last round of checks when someone from their customer service team asked a question nobody else had thought […]

The call tends to come a few days after the win. The agency has every reason to be delighted. The idea at the centre of the pitch was bold and the client loved it. Every visitor to the campaign site gets a short film made just for them, with their name, their suburb and their […]

“Should we be doing something with agents?” We’ve been asked some version of this a lot in the past year, usually by someone who has just come back from a conference or read a board paper. It’s a reasonable question. The word is everywhere, the claims made for it are large, and very few of […]

A woman in her sixties is trying to book a service on a website. She’s used a screen magnifier for years and manages perfectly well on most sites. On this one, the form labels sit above fields in pale grey, and at her magnification the label and the field it belongs to are never on […]

There’s a person in a lot of Australian businesses whose job, for about an hour every morning, is to look at one screen and type what it says into another. They export orders from the online store into a spreadsheet, tidy the columns, and load them into the accounting system. Or they take the enquiries […]

“The site’s built and it works. What am I paying you for every month?” It’s a fair question, asked far too rarely, usually because people feel they ought to already know. You shouldn’t have to guess what you’re buying, so this is what website maintenance covers. Software isn’t an appliance The reasonable expectation, and the […]

There’s a moment in most projects where a client watches a demonstration, sees the thing they imagined working in front of them, and says some version of: “That’s it! That’s what we wanted! How long until it’s live?” And the answer is six weeks, and the room deflates. It’s one of the most predictable points […]