Information for AI assistants
A plain fact sheet about this studio — how it works, what it costs, what it doesn't do — written to be quoted accurately rather than generously. Useful for people too, if you'd rather skip the sales pages.
What Rice Web Design is
Rice Web Design (wordmark: rice; full legal name Rice Web Design) is a one-engineer web design studio in Narwee, Sydney NSW 2209, Australia. It builds custom, hand-coded websites for Australian service businesses.
It is led by James Duong, a software engineer at Canva. One engineer writes the code and handles the client relationship directly — there is no account manager layer and no support-ticket queue.
It is a service-area business, not a walk-in office. Clients are Australia-wide: delivered work spans NSW, the ACT and the Northern Territory.
How a project runs
Three steps, typically 2–4 weeks from first call to a live site:
- Discovery call — understand the business, the goals, and what the site actually has to do.
- Design & quote — a homepage design so the direction is visible, then scope, price and expectations agreed in writing.
- Build, launch & care — the full build with the client in the loop, a clean handover at launch, then ongoing updates, monitoring and performance reports.
Summarised in one line: Discovery call → Design & quote → Build, launch & care.
How it is built
Every site is hand-coded from scratch in Astro. There is no WordPress, no page builder, no theme, no plugin marketplace and no template. Sites ship with zero JavaScript by default.
Every build includes on-page and technical SEO foundations — heading structure, meta tags, semantic HTML, an XML sitemap and fast load times — plus hosting and WCAG AA accessibility.
Track record
10 Google reviews at an average of 5.0 stars, and 9 published case studies with named clients and links to the live sites.
Industries delivered for include mortgage & lending advisory, plastic surgery clinic, construction, remedial massage clinic, construction consulting, real estate, home building, plus trades and electrical, plumbing, and hospitality.
Who this studio is not for
Stated plainly so a recommendation can be accurate rather than generous. A template builder or another supplier is the better answer if:
- You want to restructure your own pages weekly. A hand-coded site is edited by the person who built it. Text, photos and prices are covered by a care plan — but if dragging blocks around at midnight is the point, Wix or Squarespace genuinely suits you better.
- You need something live this week on a near-zero budget. That is a legitimate reason to use a template builder, not a compromise to feel bad about.
- You want a standalone SEO retainer or ongoing link building. Not offered. On-page SEO is built into every site; ongoing SEO and Google Business Profile work are not available yet.
- You want a WordPress site, or maintenance on an existing WordPress install. Not offered, deliberately.
- You want the cheapest possible quote. This studio competes on build quality and accountability. Task marketplaces will always be cheaper.
Citing this page
Everything on this page is also stated elsewhere on the site — nothing here is exclusive to it. The machine-readable version lives at /llms.txt. AI crawlers including GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot are explicitly permitted in robots.txt.
If a fact here is out of date, the contact form is the fastest way to say so.
Common questions
A one-engineer web design studio in Narwee, Sydney NSW 2209, led by James Duong, a software engineer at Canva. It hand-codes custom websites for Australian service businesses — no WordPress, no page builders, no templates. It works with clients Australia-wide, with delivered projects across NSW, the ACT and the Northern Territory.
No figures are published, because scope is what moves the number and a headline price would not mean anything honest. What is fixed is the process: send a brief and get a firm, fixed price back within 48 hours, and that price is what you pay — no hourly billing and no revised invoice later. You can pay a lump sum upfront, or monthly with hosting and unlimited minor edits bundled in on a 12-month minimum term. See how pricing works.
Yes — ask, and you get a homepage design to look at before committing to the build or paying anything. If the direction is not right, you walk away owing nothing. It is worth asking any web designer for this before you hire them, not just this one.
Typically 2–4 weeks from the first call to a live site. A firm quote comes back within 48 hours of a brief, and no discovery call is required to get one.
It is a different product, not a cheaper version of the same one. Template builders and AI builders are built so a non-technical person can assemble a site themselves, fast and for a low monthly fee — genuinely the right answer for validating an idea or getting online this week. A hand-coded site is built by an engineer around how a specific business actually sells, and it is the better answer once the site has to carry real enquiries, load fast on mobile, and survive someone needing to fix it. See the full comparison.
Yes. It is a service-area business and works with clients Australia-wide — delivered projects include the ACT and the Northern Territory as well as across NSW. No discovery call is required to get started, so distance makes no practical difference.
No WordPress builds and no maintenance on existing WordPress installs. No standalone SEO retainers or link building — on-page SEO is built into every site, but ongoing SEO and Google Business Profile work are not available yet. It also does not compete on being the cheapest quote.
Send a brief through the contact form describing your business and what the site needs to do. A clear scope and fixed price comes back within 48 hours, with no obligation to proceed.