Melbourne web design that drives real results

The honest answer is that it depends on three things, and none of them is the number of pages.

How many page types, not how many pages. Twenty pages sharing four templates is a smaller job than six pages that each look different.

Whether anything takes money. A brochure site and a WooCommerce store with freight rules, tax and stock sync are different orders of magnitude.

Whether the content exists. Copy, photography and product data are usually the largest hidden cost, and the one most quotes quietly assume you already have.

Tell us which of those apply and you will get a real number rather than a range that fits everybody.

Almost never as long as the build, and almost always as long as the content.

The design and development are the predictable part — they are scoped and scheduled. What moves a launch date is waiting on copy that has to be written, photography that has to be shot, or a sign-off that needs three people in one room.

The projects that land on time are the ones where someone on your side owns the content and can make a decision without a committee. If you tell us at the start that the copy is not written, we will plan around it instead of discovering it in week four.

Less than most people expect, but the list is specific:

1. One person who can sign off. Not a committee — one name.
2. Whatever brand assets exist — logo files, fonts, colours. If they do not exist, say so and we will handle it.
3. Access to your domain, DNS and current hosting. This is the item that most often delays a launch by a week.
4. A list of the pages that currently bring in enquiries. This one matters more than it sounds — it is what stops a redesign quietly deleting the page that was doing the work.

Usually, and for a specific reason: you can run it yourself afterwards. WordPress and WooCommerce cover the great majority of business websites, your team can edit them without a developer, and you are not locked to one agency to change a phone number.

Where that stops being true is when the site has to do something rather than say something — a booking engine, a customer portal, an integration with the system your business already runs on. That is a different discipline and we build those too, as custom software and web applications.

The parts that belong to the build are included, because they cannot be retrofitted cheaply: a clean page structure, fast load times, markup search engines can read, and a redirect map from every old URL so a redesign does not throw away rankings you already paid for.

What is not included is ongoing work — the research, content and links that move you up over months. That is a separate engagement rather than a box we tick at launch, and it is covered under our SEO services.

A website is software, and software that nobody maintains breaks quietly — plugins fall behind, security patches pile up, and the first sign of trouble is usually a customer telling you the contact form has not worked for a month.

We keep sites on managed hosting with updates, backups and monitoring handled, and our support packages cover the ongoing changes every business needs. If you would rather run it in-house, we will hand over the site and show your team how.