Small Australian businesses span a multitude of industries with so many nuances. Designing a website template to support any of these industries, considering brand colours, low resolution logos and no photography budget, was challenging.
The idea for Polaris started with a constant pain point I kept seeing. Clients who use their website as their portfolio (builders, beauty salons, interior designers) were consistently requesting the same changes to existing templates: remove the contact form from the hero, centre the content, and give the imagery more room to breathe. Every custom change requests adds time to the build, and the delivery teams were absorbing that cost on every website.
Small Australian businesses span a multitude of industries with so many nuances. Designing a website template to support any of these industries, considering brand colours, low resolution logos and no photography budget, was challenging.
The idea for Polaris started with a constant pain point I kept seeing. Clients who use their website as their portfolio (builders, beauty salons, interior designers) were consistently requesting the same changes to existing templates: remove the contact form from the hero, centre the content, and give the imagery more room to breathe. Every custom change requests adds time to the build, and the delivery teams were absorbing that cost on every website.
"The constraint of designing for scale pushed me to be more adaptable than any bespoke project ever could."
"The constraint of designing for scale pushed me to be more adaptable than any bespoke project ever could."
So I designed a template that was intentionally made for these clients who prefer less over more. Clean, visual, and centre-aligned, with a glass effect header and custom coding in key areas to give it a more premium finish than our existing templates allowed, while still hitting all CRO specifications.
The constraint of designing for scale pushed me to be more adaptable than any bespoke project ever could. Plus, working within the limitations of Duda made this even more challenging.
Now, Polaris is the most used template in the Localsearch library. Over 200 small Australian businesses have chosen to build their website on it, custom change requests have dropped, resulting in less time with delivery teams.
Designing this within my first six months in the industry is something I’m genuinely proud of.
So I designed a template that was intentionally made for these clients who prefer less over more. Clean, visual, and centre-aligned, with a glass effect header and custom coding in key areas to give it a more premium finish than our existing templates allowed, while still hitting all CRO specifications.
The constraint of designing for scale pushed me to be more adaptable than any bespoke project ever could. Plus, working within the limitations of Duda made this even more challenging.
Now, Polaris is the most used template in the Localsearch library. Over 200 small Australian businesses have chosen to build their website on it, custom change requests have dropped, resulting in less time with delivery teams.
Designing this within my first six months in the industry is something I’m genuinely proud of.
