Eight chapters on hiring a web agency.

What is in it

Eight chapters, about 30 minutes of reading in total. Chapter one arrives straight away, and the rest follow over ten days.

• 1. The truth about modern web design — what a site can actually do for a business, and what the law does and does not protect you from here.
• 2. The website — how scope really gets decided, who should be deciding what it looks like, and why “we only need five pages” usually costs more than it saves.
• 3. The phone call — how the first call should go, the six things that should be covered, and what to have ready.
• 4. The proposal — what a real one contains, and the five red flags that tell you to walk.
• 5. The price — how agencies calculate it, what to expect to pay in Australia, and the payment structure to insist on.
• 6. The process — the seven stages, what you should be approving at each one, and why two thirds of the work happens before anything is built.
• 7. Management and marketing — what happens after launch, what a maintenance plan should cover, and the two questions to ask before you sign one.
• 8. The next decade — how to tell whether the people you are hiring will still be useful in three years.

Why this one is not just on the page

Our public guide to hiring a web designer is free, complete, and needs no email address. If you want the short version, read that instead — it is genuinely the whole thing.

This is the long version. Eight chapters rather than nine questions, written from the inside of the industry rather than for search engines. It goes further into how proposals are structured, how pricing is actually calculated, and what a process should look like stage by stage.

We ask for an email because it arrives as a series rather than a wall of text, and because a decision-stage reader is worth talking to. That is the honest reason.

What you are agreeing to

Your first name and your email address. Nothing else, and no qualifying questions — you are reading, not buying.

You will get chapter one immediately and the remaining seven over the following ten days. Then it stops. There is no newsletter, and we will not add you to one. Every email has an unsubscribe link that works, and you can reply to any of them and reach a person.

What we do with your details is set out in the privacy policy, in plain English.

That is the guide. If it would help to talk it through, book twenty minutes — bring a proposal you have been sent and we will tell you what we would ask about it.