In 2025 we’ve had a lot of new clients reach out to us to get some help with their website design and development after finding out the hard way that not all website designers and developers provide the same services. When commencing the process of choosing someone to work with on a new website for your business, consider making a checklist of the services they offer.

An example of this was a new client we’re working with who engaged the services of an agency to design their website. This company is a national organisation that has an internal graphic design department. The scope of their project with their original agency was for them to design a website that meets certain style guidelines with the internal designers preparing mock-up website design layouts. They tasked their website designer with making them a website to meet their design criteria.

The agency they chose was what the industry refers to as a no-code website designer. While there’s nothing wrong with no-code website designers (a website producer who can’t read and write website code), they are limited with what they can design in terms of a website’s structure and layout. No-code website designers make their websites by choosing a (usually) WordPress premade website template and then changing colours, images and text in this template.

When a client submits their own layout requests to a no-code website designer, they simply search through a library for a template that matches the desired layout as much as possible. With our new client, what they were presented with looked nothing like their expectations and, when they asked their no-code website design agency to make some visual changes, were told that the website layout can’t be changed.

The other type of website design and development agency that exists is the code-fluent type, like Allcorp. We, and other agencies like ours around the country, design and develop our websites from the ground up by writing custom code to form the structure of the website. Code that we are fluent in include PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, SQL (Structured Query Language), JavaScript, HTML and CSS among others. By understanding how to read and write code in these different languages, we have the freedom to design websites as we want them to be from the ground up.

While this may mean that our websites take a bit more time to engineer than the no-code sort, it does mean that we can say to any client, show us anything that you’ve seen on a website before, and we can do it. In fact, we can likely do it much better.

For a number of years now, we’ve been helping our clients establish a credible social media history and regular ongoing posting service. In conjunction with their website, we have this value-added service to maintain, on behalf of our clients, a clearer, more professional and brand-consistent social media presence.

Research consistently shows that consumers will often do their research when choosing to spend their money with a business, and while we believe the most important part of what they will see is the website, some do delve deeper and look at a business on Facebook or Instagram.

Ideally, what a potential customer should see when they check out your business on any social media is regular, professional, consistent posting. The design of these posts should also match the branding of the company website, which is ideal when you already have your website with us.

The challenge faced by many business owners is that in the past, they may have left their social media management up to someone who is no longer employed at the company or an agency from years past who are no longer in business. Or even a mixture of the above, multiple times over multiple years.

We’ve certainly seen some corporate social media channels that have been left up to too many different people for too long. These don’t look enticing and surely don’t portray a corporate structure of any kind of order. The question is, would this be enough to steer a potential customer away?

Many of our clients spend thousands of dollars keeping their fleet vehicles professionally sign written or wrapped, have impeccable uniforms and offices with beautifully made signage and branding. (Not to forget their amazing Allcorp designed website!) This quality should also carry through to every aspect of a business’ digital footprint, including how they appear on their social media channels.

At Allcorp, we help hundreds of clients keep up appearances across all of their social channels. If you’d like some help in maintaining this area of your business, get in touch and we can work out a schedule that suits your needs, budget and time.

These days, it is fairly clear to all business owners that advertising in a phone book is long gone and a thing of the distant past. When we first started Allcorp in 2000, it wasn’t unusual for a business to be spending $10,000 - $20,000 per year to feature prominently in these old books.

The tide turned on this industry and while the Yellow Pages and Local Directories tried to hang on as long as they could, even making an attempt to get in on the website design and digital marketing industry at the latter years weren’t good enough to save them.

It wasn’t because their books weren’t printed well, weren’t edited, proofed and compiled properly, or even the ads themselves, they weren’t designed poorly. All that happened was that business owners started looking elsewhere because they realised their message wasn’t reaching their audience anymore. This is because the audience had moved on and were finding answers to their questions in Google Search.

Today, we’re seeing the same trajectory with the promptly vanishing radio and television networks. The audiences are leaving these mediums in droves and, as primarily representing news and current affairs outlets, it must be embarrassing to constantly report on how the industry you work in is disappearing.

We’re hearing more and more business owners wanting to get away from their monthly advertising contracts with the radio and television producers in the region. And with plans ranging between $2,000 - $5,000 per month, it’s understandable to see why.

The answer is simple. YouTube. Owned by Google since 2006, YouTube has over 2 billion active monthly users and on an average day, generates around $50 to $70 million in ad revenue.

The reality today is that more people consume content on YouTube than Channel 7, Channel 10, Channel 9 and all of the Australian commercial radio stations combined. Your audience has moved here. They’re watching YouTube on their Smart TV’s in their living rooms, they’re listening to podcasts streaming from YouTube in their cars, they’re consuming video content while queuing and on public transport. When did you last see someone under the age of 40 who wasn’t constantly checking their phone?

At Allcorp, we’ve been promoting YouTube advertising since 2021. What we’re seeing is that for modest budgets, less than half what the typical radio or TV advertising contract is per month, we’re getting our clients message broadcasting to 50,000 – 70,000 sets of local ears and eyes every month. Remember, we’re only streaming our client ads in the towns they service, just like Google Ads.

If you want to learn more about how Allcorp can help your business find your audience again, send us a message and we’ll setup a completely free consultation where we can meet with you and your team in person. We can even assist with getting you out of any contracts you may have with current old-tech TV & Radio suppliers so you can start seeing returns on your marketing investment straight away.

Because we deal with so many local businesses in the region, we’ve been hearing the same complaints with employers not being able to get staff to work. The shift in the employer versus employee relationship changed post pandemic and effectively turned the tables, giving the employee supposedly more control.

One story, for example, was from a cabinetmaker client who was looking to start a new 1st year apprentice. One of the candidates for the position was located down in Melbourne and, during the interview, had some demands. First off was the unusual 1st year apprentice salary request of $100,000, but on top of this they also demanded that the employer pay their relocation expenses, pay for their rental house, give them a company car and phone and let them work only 4 days a week.

Obviously, their resume was tossed in the trash. But the underlying problem we’ve been hearing from clients is they can’t get staff, staff feel they are entitled to too much money and perks or they just don’t want to work at all.

Another example was the Cairns Regional Council who couldn’t get all their employees to come back to work and had to resort to scrapping the mandatory drug testing procedures, just to try and get some workers to apply for roles.

It was really getting tragic because we have clients who all had the same undertone of “There’s lots of work to do, but we can’t get staff to do it.”

Fortunately, it looks as though this is shifting back to normal. We’re hearing more positive news from clients who are working at their full capacity with all hands on deck. The laziness-generating Work From Home concept is disappearing and overall, we’re hearing potential candidates for employment positions are expressing more appreciation for opportunities. Even the Cairns Regional Council reverted back to their mandatory drug testing policies and got rid of all the temporary personnel they had to hire to fill the gaps in the workforce last year.

It’s really good to hear the positivity coming from our more than 1,000 business-owning clients and, with interest rates coming down, workers going back to work, the outlook for a prosperous 2025 is looking much clearer.

2025 marks our 25th year in business and we have some great new products to launch

With a history as long as ours and a client base as dominant, Allcorp really have proven that we are the best in the business and the envy of our competition. Indeed, the younger agencies want what we have established, but like most people in the newer generations, they want it all without working for it.

The founders of Allcorp have always been hard workers, putting in 100 hour weeks at the very beginning to establish ourselves. We’ve worked for 25 years in the same digital marketing industry and have always been at the forefront of creativity and design language. Always being North Queensland based, we’ve positioned ourselves as the leaders in our field in our region.

We wanted to say a big thank you to all the great businesses we have worked with to get to this 25 year milestone. Some clients are still with us from the beginning, some have retired and some have passed the business onto a second or even third generation.

Without the support of all the great local family businesses we’ve come to know so well over the years, we wouldn’t still be here today. We appreciate knowing each of our clients on a first name basis and appreciate being welcomed into their offices and homes as colleagues.

We also understand the importance of customer service and ensuring our clients are looked after. Our customer service procedures and policies along with our professional communication standards are one of the main reasons why we have managed to retain such a huge and growing list of clients.

So, cheers for the support to the more than 1,000 friends and colleagues in business who rely on us to keep them properly marketed.

Let’s get to work for 2025!