Web Development in New Zealand

What actually changes the price

Four things move a website quote, and none of them is how good the design looks in the proposal.

• How many templates, not how many pages. Two hundred pages that all look the same cost less than eight pages that all look different. Ask how many distinct layouts your site needs — that is the number being priced.
• Whether anything is behind a login. A site that shows information is one kind of project. A site that takes bookings, holds accounts or accepts payments is software, and software is priced differently.
• Who writes and moves the content. Migrating 300 pages of existing content, tidying it and redirecting the old URLs is real work. Some quotes include it, some quietly assume you will do it.
• What happens after launch. Hosting, updates, backups and small changes are ongoing costs. A cheap build with no plan for these is not cheap, it is deferred.

The three sites people mean by "a website"

A brochure site tells people who you are, what you sell and how to reach you. For most New Zealand businesses this is genuinely all that is needed, and paying for more is paying for the developer's portfolio rather than your revenue.

A redesign starts with a site that works but embarrasses you, or that nobody can edit without ringing a developer. The valuable part is rarely the visuals — it is fixing the reason the old site became unmaintainable.

A site with functionality behind it — bookings, memberships, quoting, a searchable directory, a customer login — is a web application wearing a website's clothes. If your brief contains the words "and then they can log in and…", expect the quotes to jump, and expect that to be legitimate.

Ownership, and the question nobody asks

Ask who owns the code, the domain and the hosting account when the invoice is paid. The answer should be "you", in writing, before work starts.

The common bad arrangement in New Zealand is not malice. A developer registers the domain on their own account because it was faster, hosts the site on their reseller plan because it was cheaper, and builds on a licence held in their name. Three years later they retire, change business, or you fall out, and untangling it costs more than the site did.

Domain in your name at a registrar you control. Hosting billed to you. Code in a repository you can access. None of this is unreasonable, and a good developer will already have set it up that way.

Rankings survive a rebuild, or they do not

If you already have a site, the traffic it earns is an asset you have paid for in time or advertising. Rebuilds lose it in one specific way: URLs change and nothing tells Google where they went.

The fix is unglamorous — a redirect map from every old URL to its replacement, tested before launch — and it takes a few hours. Skipping it costs months of traffic that is slow to recover and hard to diagnose, because the site looks fine. Ask each developer how they will handle redirects. A precise answer means they have done this before.

Speed is a feature you can measure before you buy

Run your current site through PageSpeed Insights and keep the result. It gives you a number to improve on and a way to hold a promise to account.

Most slow New Zealand sites are slow for boring reasons: uncompressed photos straight off a camera, a stack of plugins each loading its own scripts, and hosting in another hemisphere. All three are fixable and none requires a rebuild, which is worth knowing before you commission one.

Editing it yourself

"You can edit everything yourself" and "you can edit the text on existing pages" are very different promises, and both get made in the same sentence.

Be specific about what you expect to change without help: adding a staff member, publishing a news post, adding a whole new service page with its own layout, changing the navigation. Ask for a demonstration on your own content before final payment, not a description in a proposal.

What to compare across quotes

• Assumptions. What each developer assumed about content, templates and functionality. This explains nearly every price gap.
• The monthly number. Hosting, licences, plugins and support, totalled, for twelve months.
• Ownership. Domain, hosting, code and design files, named.
• Redirects. How old URLs will be mapped and tested.
• What happens when something breaks at 4pm on a Friday. Response times, and whether they cost extra.
• A site still running. One built two years ago, and the owner's phone number.

Describe the business, not the website

You do not need to specify a CMS, a framework or a page count. Describe what your business does, who you want to reach, and what the current site fails to do. Developers who build sites like yours every week will tell you which of the three projects you actually have — and where they disagree with each other is the most useful information you will get.