Taken in 2024 on a visit to my Sister in the UK (That’s Pinot Gin in the glass!)
I’m Dave Smyth, director of Energise Web Design in Whangarei. I’ve been building websites and helping businesses with digital marketing professionally since 1999. Originally, I was one of three partners who formed a company called Epoch Web Design. At that time, there was no one doing professional website design in Whangarei. There were people who built the odd website, but no one who was worked full-time as a professional web designer.
My first website development was for a business I owned called Marlin Financial Solutions. I was a financial advisor specialising in personal insurance and retirement planning. I did find someone who tried to build a website for me but it was so bad, I ended up doing it myself. I had studied computer science at university in England and while the programming wasn’t too difficult, the graphics took some time to get right. My first website design was an arduous task that took over 40 hours to complete, with the end result being just a few basic pages.
In 1999, there was very little demand for business websites in Whangarei. The Internet was still a relatively new thing, having only arrived in New Zealand via Waikato University in 1989. Even though I was an early user on the web compared to the rest of the general public, I only got access to it in 1997 and had to suffer extremely slow connection speeds, small screens, low resolution and a “web-safe” colour palette of only 256 colours. It was great fun but only if you were prepared to wait a few minutes for a web page to load. Back then, the most popular web browser was not Internet Explorer, but something called Netscape.
By 2002, I had shifted almost entirely into web design full time. By this point, had gone out on my own, and formed Energise Web Design Ltd. Eventually, I would sell off my insurance and investment business, as web design took all my time.
In the early days of website design, we didn’t worry too much about SEO or where a website ranked. It was easy. All you had to do was stuff more keywords on your page than the other guy. I would ask a client what they wanted to be found for and then jam lots of those words on the page. A neat trick back then was to put in a ton of text the same colour as the background of the page. Search engines would read it but the viewer wouldn’t be distracted by all this extra waffle. This was when Google was still a fledgling business not many had heard of, and Yahoo! was the big player. Other popular search engines of the time were; Alta Vista, Webcrawler, Excite, Alltheweb, Hotbot, Lycos and Ask. Most people would never have heard of them now. They were almost all bought out by bigger players after their moment in the sun. Only Ask still survives.
Everything moved so quickly over the next 10 years that I hardly had time to catch my breath. Google stormed to dominance, leaving Yahoo in its dust and of course Google and the other search engines wised up to the “invisible” text and various other tricks. Now, SEO is an ever-changing field of expertise as Google try to keep everyone honest and we look for new ways to gain that prestigious #1 ranking.
We grew over time and started offering Google Ads Management services. Google launched their ads platform way back in 2000 and now it accounts for around 95% of all Google’s revenue! Google Ads are now very important to help my clients rank highly for really competitive searches. As time went by, the Google Ads results displaced natural listings with paid listings, pushing down even local search results in favour pf paid advertising. Now, if you’re not paying for Google Ads, one of your competitors is!
I continue to enjoy offering website design & hosting, search engine optimisation and digital marketing services to my clients in Whangarei, throughout New Zealand and also overseas. I now have a team of people working for me, so I can focus on client service. If you need a website or need help with digital marketing, contact me for a no-obligation chat!