Reflecting on 2023—and Celebrating 5 Years of Fix8 Media + Duda

Author’s Note: The following is an unsolicited editorial based on my personal experience working with the Duda web platform at my agency.

As 2023 comes to a close at Fix8 Media, I’ve been reflecting on our company’s challenges and successes throughout the year. 2023 marks over 5 years since our agency adopted the Duda platform as our primary website building tool. Having begun building websites in 1998, I’ve seen many softwares come and go. As I look back over the past five years of working in Duda, it’s very apparent to me how Duda has helped my agency achieve new milestones, five of which I touch on here. If you’re an agency owner considering Duda, or if you have questions about a real agency’s application of the platform in their business, feel free to reach out to me directly. I would be happy to share more about my experience.

5 Ways Duda Has Benefited My Agency

1. Limitless Design Capabilities

I first began building websites in ASP.net in 1998. In 2007, I started building in Squarespace when it was just 3 years out of the founder’s dorm room. My primary purpose for adopting Squarespace at that time was to empower Fix8 Media's clients, as I have always prided myself on building websites that clients can manage on their own. As Squarespace grew in its early years, they had a clear focus on working with agencies like ours—so much so that we met with Squarespace multiple times to advise how they could effectively approach other agencies and grow their business in that market segment. Our firm successfully built nearly 1,000 Squarespace websites, but by 2018 it was clear things were changing there. What started with some moderately sized acquisitions certainly paved the way for the company to go public. Subsequently, Squarespace’s focus changed to DIY, eliminating support channels for agencies other than chat—essentially leaving us in a position with little support and a lot of frustration. As we began to hear from countless clients concerned with the lack of support on their websites, we knew we had to look for a better solution.

Not long after, I was introduced to Duda on LinkedIn. I was very impressed early on with the platform and its capabilities. Our agency has always had a channel that supported partnerships with other marketing and branding agencies, and in many of those cases designs are provided to our team with an expectation of them being spot-on, pixel-perfect translations to the web. By this point, Squarespace was not supporting any custom code, making it nearly impossible to effect the provided designs in Squarespace, and leaving us in a position where we couldn’t support our clients. As a business owner who puts his clients first, this did not sit well with me, so we decided to implement Duda for our custom builds.

Today—over 1,500 Duda websites later—we have nearly limitless design capabilities in this platform, as it provides design flexibility with a variety of customizable sections and templates, enabling creative agencies to leverage these tools to their advantage. I can proudly say as the CEO and Creative Director of Fix8 Media, we are building the most beautiful, high-performing websites with the highest conversion rates that I’ve built in my 25-year career.

2. Recurring Revenue Stream

Being that I’ve always been very big on empowering clients, during our many years building Squarespace websites I felt it was very important for our clients to own their Squarespace accounts. I never wanted there to be any lapse in our clients getting the support they needed, which always put everyone at ease. They were hiring us for our creative services and we’d work within their accounts. Migrating to Duda changed this process for our agency, as with the Duda model we host client websites within our own instance of the Duda platform. This has become a considerable boost to our business, as we now collect annual hosting payments from clients and include the most top notch training and support structure we could deploy. This includes weekly live training sessions with me, where I personally teach all clients how to work within their Duda websites to update, add pages, blog, and more! We offer timely support, with the same team providing the support services and building the websites, so they know our clients and understand their needs.

The hosting and maintenance fee is a new recurring revenue stream for our business that did not exist in Squarespace. And by hosting the websites, it’s easier to sell add-on services such as Duda Apps that clients need, simply adding these services to their recurring payments. While we use a third-party payment processor for recurring billing, Duda is set up to enable automatic billing to your agency’s clients, which helps streamline business operations for many.

3. Agency Partnerships and White Label Work

In the time I’ve been in this industry, many agencies have gotten into web design due to the numerous available web building platforms. So by happenstance, a number of agencies have adopted web design into their menu of services. We find that some of these agencies find themselves overwhelmed with work and need a partner to turn to for either challenging projects or overflow work—or for builds that they can’t accomplish in other platforms such as Squarespace. We’ve built a number of agency relationships such as these, working in both a fully transparent capacity with their clients or at times a total white-label relationship, where we act as an extension of the agency. Our partners rely on us not only for our Duda expertise, but also for the tried and true processes and business tools we have in place here at Fix8 to ensure projects are managed with care and precision. These relationships have enabled our agency to grow and diversify in a variety of niche markets while expanding our global reach.

4. Team Happiness

This is a big one for me: Our team is just happier working in the Duda platform because they are able to be more successful with design work and SEO, given all the tools Duda offers in these areas. It’s one thing to come to work every day and enjoy what you do, but imagine having the best toolbox available to make your work better, while having the training and resources available to ensure you are educated and up to speed. Duda has its very own University online with a thorough educational center as well as certifications in the platform. Duda has it all—and my team is delighted to continue to grow their skills while pushing the boundaries of design and, most importantly, exceeding our clients' expectations.

5. The People at Duda

While my team loves the Duda web tools themselves, it’s truly the people at Duda who make the platform so special. The fact we can go directly to humans who care about our agency’s success with support requests is key to our success. But that said, everyone has been so welcoming to us and treated our agency like we’re their number one customer. This is how you want to be treated as a customer. So as far as customer service goes, the Duda team is second to none. I truly believe our account managers and amazing support team at Duda have our agency’s best interests in mind, and you can’t say that about many software companies. To say we are grateful for our friends and partners at Duda is an understatement.

Looking back, it’s been an amazing 5 years becoming part of the Duda family, and we’ve never been more excited about the future of our business.

Wishing all our friends, customers, and colleagues a healthy and happy holiday season, and a successful and fulfilling new year,

Josh Neimark
CEO and Creative Director
Fix8 Media
Proud Duda Solutions Partner