Daniel Duckworth Interview (a cool smart dude)

Tell us exactly about how DesignQuotes helps ME to find a good web design company?

Right, so if you’re a small business and you want to start a website project you can use the Design Quotes Comparison Tool to submit a brief and get matched with local web designers that suit your project and budget. The designers then send you quotes and you choose the deal that best suits you. All our members are evaluated on an ongoing basis to ensure that you are matched with the best web designers in the country.

So in a few words, DesignQuotes brings “fairness” to an industry where is difficult to know if you are paying the right amount and/or if you are hiring the right company…. am I right?

That’s a large part of what we offer. Lots of businesses don’t know how much they should spend on a web design project. By sourcing multiple quotes for the same brief there is a sense among the providers that they need to provide a fair quote or they won’t have a chance at winning the project. However web design pricing can be tricky. The same brief can still produce wildly different quotes because of the types of websites out there. So we wrote something call the Web Design Buyer’s Guide which is a 6-part series that teaches people about the entire process of outsourcing web design.

I also noticed that DesignQuotes has a lot of educational information as part of your core service. Tell us about your content…

Yeah, we have two sources of really great info. We have a digital marketing blog where we provide the latest tips on anything from making sure your website is converting visitors into customers to headline copywriting advice. Then we also have buyer’s guides.

The first guide we published is that Web Design Buyer’s Guide I mentioned. The idea is that the more educated people are about what they are buying, the less likely they are to run into problems and unexpected costs. It also means that the web designers are getting good clients who understand the process rather than people who expect the world for a few bucks.

Where do you see DesignQuotes evolving?

That’s a really good question and I’m ready to go public with some of this. We are developing something called the Digital Collective which is a community driven website for digital media professionals in Australia.

Think Pinterest, cross LinkedIn, cross SEOMOZ. The digital collective will be the premiere space for digital media professionals in Australia to talk about their industry. Unlike an association we won’t be charging a membership for a boring monthly newsletter. Instead, it’s free and the members define their industry. It’s going to be big and it’s going to be awesome.

You deal with web designers all the time… what is your take in the web design industry here in Australia….

I think Australian small business web designers are incredibly innovative. I’ve seen beautiful and sophisticated websites created for surprisingly low budgets. Lots of web design companies are building their own CMS platforms or leveraging of other peoples platform to really reduce the costs for small business websites. There are also some seriously talented designers out there. I think we are lucky since we can choose between price or quality. However it’s the big corporate website that seem to suffer. I suspect it’s a problem with internal communications and red tape that produce such unfriendly websites.