Website design · Sunshine Coast, QLD

Website design on the Sunshine Coast

A region with a dozen town centres and no single CBD, which changes what your site has to say about where you work.

The short answer

We design and build websites for Sunshine Coast businesses, from Caloundra north to Noosa and back through the hinterland. Builds run on WordPress, Shopify or Webflow, sit on Australian hosting, and are handed over with every login in your name. AR Digital Solutions has 32 staff and no lock in contracts.

A dozen town centres, and most of the work starts in a shed between them

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The Sunshine Coast has no centre in the sense Brisbane has one. It has about a dozen, and they were separate towns long before they shared a council. Caloundra at the southern end, Kawana and Birtinya around the hospital, Maroochydore, Buderim on the hill, Coolum near the airport, Noosa at the top, and Nambour and Maleny inland. End to end is roughly an hour up the Bruce Highway and the Sunshine Motorway, longer in January.

The trade base fills the gaps between those centres. Sheds at Kunda Park, the Warana and Kawana estates, Gateway Drive at Noosaville, Caloundra West and Yandina. Cabinet makers, electricians, plumbers, earthmovers, landscapers, pool builders, and the civil crews on the estates at Caloundra South and Palmview. Most are family businesses with two directors and a handful of vans, running on word of mouth until the year word of mouth runs thin.

The geography is the commercially important part. A cabinet maker at Kunda Park will measure a kitchen at Peregian on Tuesday and another at Little Mountain on Thursday, so the catchment is the whole region. The searching is not. Nobody types "cabinet maker Sunshine Coast" when they can type "cabinet maker Caloundra".

What a trade site here has to do that a city site doesn't

Your visitor is standing in a half demolished bathroom holding a phone, or sitting in a car outside a house they just bought. Not browsing. They want to know whether you cover the address and whether anyone will ring back.

So the phone number sits at the top of every screen, tappable. The quote form asks for the job address in the first field rather than the fifth, because the suburb decides whether the job is worth quoting. Job photos get grouped by town rather than by year, so someone in Buderim sees a Buderim job. Your QBCC or electrical licence number goes where a customer can find it in four seconds, since checking it is now normal.

Speed matters more than the design awards suggest. Mobile coverage in the hinterland behind Nambour and Maleny drops out in patches, and a page carrying eight megabytes of hero video will not load there at all. We build on WordPress for most trade and service businesses, Shopify where there are products to sell and Webflow where the design work is heavier than the functionality, then compress the images and put the site on Australian hosting in a Sydney data centre instead of installing a caching plugin and calling it a fix. Our trade and construction page covers the sector rather than the region.

One site, a dozen catchments

Google's map results are weighted by how close a business sits to the person searching, which on a region shaped like this bites hard. A searcher in Coolum sees businesses near Coolum. Your pin sits at your shed, so the map covers a bubble of maybe fifteen kilometres and everything past it has to be won with pages.

The site therefore needs a page per town you genuinely service, written about that town, with jobs you have done there. Six real pages beat twenty thin ones with the name swapped, and the thin ones are what local SEO work has to clean up later. If you run from home, the profile is set up as a service area business with the address hidden, listing the towns your vans reach rather than a fifty kilometre circle that includes open water.

Where else we work up here

We build for businesses the length of the Coast, from Caloundra and Little Mountain through Kawana, Birtinya, Buderim and Coolum up to Noosa, and inland to Nambour and the Blackall Range.

Also see website design in Maroochydore if the commercial centre is your main market, and website design in Brisbane if you work both ends of the highway.

How a build runs

  1. We look at the work you want more of

    Which jobs pay best, which towns you will drive to, and which enquiries you keep turning down.

  2. Scope and price, in writing

    A fixed number before anyone opens a design file, with the pages listed so nothing turns up later as a variation.

  3. Build on a staging link

    You mark it up as we go rather than seeing it for the first time at handover.

  4. Launch, then keep it running

    Hosting, updates and backups, with Managed Support replying inside one to three hours.

Reasons to build with us

Developers rather than template assemblers.

The people building your site also run the servers it sits on, so when something breaks on a Friday afternoon the person who can fix it is on staff.

Everything in your name.

Domain, hosting, files and analytics all transfer if you leave, with nothing held in an agency account.

No lock in contract.

Projects are fixed scope and fixed price. Support is month to month.

"You're not on the Coast."

Correct. We are at Pallara in southern Brisbane, an hour and a half down the Bruce Highway, and that is the only office we hold. Renting a desk at Maroochydore to claim a local address is not something we will do. The build happens on calls and screen shares anyway.

FAQs

Frequently asked questions

Still wondering about something? Call 07 3067 8910 or 0425 879 379, mon to fri, 8:30am to 5:30pm.

  • Sometimes, for a kickoff or a photo shoot. It is an hour and a half each way from Pallara, and the rest runs over video calls and a staging link.

Book a discovery call

Twenty minutes on what you build, how far you will drive for it, and which parts of the current site are costing you jobs.

Book a discovery call

Ready for a website that brings in work?

Tell us what you need and we'll show you how we'd approach it. No pressure, just a straight answer about what will work for your business.