This week we joined the Designers Institute of New Zealand.
Seven years of building websites, and I could talk for hours about how important design is in shaping commercial outcomes. A business owner will come to us saying they need a new website, and we'll spend the first meeting not talking about design at all. We talk about what the current site is failing to do. Where people are leaving. What visitors need to understand before they'll make contact or buy. When we get to the actual work, design is how most of that gets solved.
Our client Heritage Saunas runs a 4.6% enquiry conversion rate against a 2.7% industry benchmark. Clean Collective saw a 103% conversion rate increase after their Shopify build. The decisions that drove those numbers were design decisions. How a page is structured. What a visitor sees first, and second. Where weight falls. Those are the things that determine whether someone picks up the phone or closes the tab.
I've followed the Best Awards for years. Every year there are entries that stop you, and I find myself going back through the winners more than once. The NZ design community produces work that surprises people who haven't been paying attention to it. By now, it shouldn't.
The Designers Institute is the professional body behind a lot of that. They push people to raise their game and give the design community somewhere to belong. Being part of that feels right for where Skyrocket sits. We build websites at the edge of design and commercial performance. That's where the interesting problems are.
It's great company to be in.
