A Q&A with Fix8 Media Founder and Creative Director, Josh Neimark, on Shifting His Agency to Primarily Focus on the Duda Website Platform

What was it about Duda that initially piqued your interest?

To be completely honest, the first thing that excited me was the name—as I’m a huge fan of The Dude [from The Big Lebowski]. It was apparent early on that the Duda toolset would allow us to eliminate compromises on behalf of our design team—and our clients—due to the inherent limitations in Squarespace. In addition, Duda’s steady stream of updates and enhanced functionality gave me a true sense that their commitment to developing the platform was strong and real. This is super important to us if we’re going to put a client in a platform. After 22 years in this industry, I’ve seen many web software companies come and go. It was clear to me that Duda is here to stay.

How is Duda different from Squarespace, and what did that mean for Fix8 Media?

Firstly, the stability of the platform is incredible. As Squarespace has grown, our agency has experienced more issues with downtime and overall bugginess, particularly as they began to develop the latest Squarespace version 7.1. This, unfortunately, can wreak havoc on our production schedule, which can impact client deadlines. In the time we’ve been building with Duda, we’ve not seen one system outage.

When and why did you decide to start building websites for your clients primarily in the Duda platform?

After carefully vetting the platform and Duda in general, we began moving our agency clients’ work into Duda. Firstly, as most agency work comes with a spec, it nearly always requires extensive customization in Squarespace. This in turn limits our clients' ability to get support. We quickly realized that we could be delivering a superior product with a somewhat new and unique value proposition to our clients. Around the same time, we had a major shift when the COVID-19 pandemic began. While there was uncertainty for most businesses, we quickly strategized to put together a special offering to help those impacted by the global crisis. Due to our very special, highly affordable pandemic website package, we were able to onboard a number of new clients in the Duda platform.

How does the support for agencies differ from Duda compared to Squarespace in your opinion? 

That’s an interesting question. Obviously, as companies grow, things can change. Thinking back, there was a time I recall seeing a video shared on a Squarespace blog when a hurricane had flooded downtown New York City. The Squarespace employees were literally carrying 5-gallon buckets of gasoline up the stairs to keep the generators that power the servers going. That was the kind of commitment Squarespace had to its customers, which I thought was amazing. Over the years, Fix8 had the privilege of interacting with various members of the Squarespace team, sometimes leveraging our knowledge and experience for programs they were working on, and other times participating in pilot programs they were trying to get off the ground. However, in the last few years, it’s become clear that Squarespace was on the path toward IPO, which we assumed when they made their first acquisition of Acuity Scheduling. As their business strategy has changed, unfortunately that also changed the relationship that Squarespace as a platform had with true website designers and developers. While they have always been DIY to a degree, there was a time when they were quite proud of the relationships they had with the design and development community, going so far as to feature that work. But all of that changed a few years ago, first with an attempt to outsource their specialist directory to Crew.co, which later became part of Dribble. And more recently, when Squarespace decided to completely outsource their Specialist Directory to 99designs.com.

For us and many of our colleagues who had become proficient in the Squarespace platform, this was a major turning point. While we’ve built over 850 sites in Squarespace and worked on countless other existing websites, we get the exact same support that a retail client with one website receives. Squarespace doesn’t differentiate their support for web professionals versus consumers. As is so common with SaaS companies, the Squarespace support team has grown and grown over the years, but the quality of service has not followed suit. We hear complaints from our Squarespace website clients who can’t get the help they need from Support, and unfortunately we don’t have the direct line they would expect a company in our position would. So we are left with limitations to how we can help our own clients with their issues. 

To the contrary, Duda provides incredible support. I or anyone on my team can pick up the phone and connect with an expert who is not only happy to tell us how to solve a problem, but at times even willing to go into the site we’re working on and solve it for us. This has been groundbreaking for our agency, as it helps us service our clients to the best of our ability. 

So in summary, our opportunity to deepen our relationship with Duda came at an ideal time, due to the shift in the Squarespace model.

In addition to incredible support, what other benefits does Duda offer to your clients?

In addition to the amazing and ever-evolving Duda toolset, two components to the platform that are game changing for us are dynamic pages and web personalization tools. At our agency, we focus on design, development, and SEO, as well as engage in a handful of ongoing strategic partnerships with clients. The Duda tools are incredibly important in executing measurable strategies for our clients. For example, if we’d like to enable a restaurant client to have a special offer show up for people in a specific zip code, on a specific device, Duda web personalization accomplishes that. This is incredibly powerful and translates to real, measurable success for our clients. 

Regarding dynamic pages, one of the biggest benefits here is the ability for our clients to update and create pages efficiently and effectively—and in some cases without even having to log into their Duda websites. From our perspective, it's great to be able to give clients the power of that content management without anyone worrying about breaking a website or design. 

How have Fix8 Media’s offerings changed due to the adoption of the Duda platform?

The biggest change in our offering is that all of our Duda clients are welcome to attend our weekly open training and Q&A sessions. As I have always enjoyed teaching, this certainly has allowed us to provide support in a different manner to our Duda clients, and in a way that enables us to keep them going with all the wonderful tools we provide. It’s also proven very valuable, as we have a number of clients who drop in as needed with questions they’d like answered live. Lastly, those sessions have really become a wonderful tool for us to have new clients attend if they are uncertain about which platform would best suit their needs. I always suggest they join us on a training session so they can see the CMS in action and ask some other clients about their experiences.

Also of note is our capacity for bigger projects. Due to the limitations of scalability within the Squarespace platform, we are again more comfortable taking on larger builds with high page counts in Duda. Dynamic pages allow us to think through our process differently and to very efficiently build large websites.

What role does Duda play in helping Fix8 Media accomplish its mission of “building websites that build businesses”?

While there are many specific examples I can provide on how Duda has helped us with individual projects, I think I would sum it up by saying Duda provides Fix8 Media with amazing tools, new product releases, incredible live support, and peak performance. At the end of the day, while I’m a creative, I’m very linear and big on measurement. Simply running our Squarespace sites versus our Duda builds through the Google Lighthouse testing tool, the results are not even close. This is what prompted us to move our own, very large website from Squarespace to Duda. Fix8 Media wants to take advantage of all the same great tools we are giving our clients. The performance scores are so drastically different, we have to give our clients the best tools we can. And while we’ll still support our Squarespace clients and will still build websites for clients in the platform, we consider Duda our web builder of choice—now and into the foreseeable future.