How to hire a web designer in Australia.
The buyer’s guide
What things actually cost, what you must own, and the questions that protect you from an expensive mistake. Written to be useful whoever you hire, including if it is not us.
Everything below is free to read, no email needed. The eight-chapter version comes by email.
The numbers almost nobody publishes.
What things cost
Almost no Australian agency publishes a price, so the honest answer is: you will usually have to sit through a sales call to find out. We checked page one of Google for the main Sydney search terms, and not one competitor puts a number on its site.
What drives the price is thinking, not pages. Working out what the site needs to say, to whom, and in what order costs nearly the same for a one-page site as for a ten-page one, which is why a cheap quote usually means that part was skipped.
For a benchmark you can actually check: our builds start at A$5,500, fixed and published. Anyone quoting far below that is leaving the thinking out, and it will show in the result, not in the demo.
Shared hosting for a small business site costs about A$10 to A$20 a month once the introductory rate expires. Managed WordPress hosting starts at roughly A$100 a month.
Watch the renewal, not the advert: a plan promoted at A$2.99 a month on a three year prepayment renews at A$9.99, an increase of 234 per cent. The advertised figure is rarely the figure you pay.
A .com.au domain costs roughly A$20 to A$40 a year, paid to the registrar. It should be registered in your name, not the agency’s. That one detail decides who owns your address on the internet.
Four assets decide who really owns your website.
Ownership
Before you sign anything, ask whose name each of these is in. The answer should be yours, all four.
- The domain: registered to you, at a registrar you can log into.
- The site files and the database: yours, and exportable at any time.
- The hosting account: in your name, or movable to your name on request.
- The logins: hosting, WordPress admin, analytics. Every one of them, handed over.
One platform warning belongs here. A Wix or Squarespace site cannot be exported and switched on somewhere else, so you are only ever renting it. Moving means rebuilding the site, usually in WordPress, and carrying the content, the URLs and the search rankings across carefully. A standard WordPress site, by contrast, runs on any host in the world.
A proper build has stages, and you approve each one.
The process
A serious builder can tell you their process before you ask. Ours runs about two months across seven stages: discovery, copywriting, layout, design, build, testing, handover, and you sign off each stage before the next begins. The exact shape varies between good builders. The existence of a shape does not.
The order matters more than the names. The words should be written and approved before anything is designed, and the design approved before anything is built. If a builder shows you a design before anyone has asked what the site needs to say, the thinking is being skipped.
If a builder cannot describe their process, that is the answer, and it is a free one.
The site has to survive the years after the invoice.
After launch
Yes. Plugin updates take about twenty minutes a month when nothing goes wrong, and most of a day when something does. What a paid plan buys is the staging copy that catches a bad update before it reaches your live site, and the off-site backup that gets the site back when it does not.
If the domain, the site files, the hosting account and the logins are all in your name, very little changes. Another WordPress developer can take the site over and keep it running. If any of them are in the old developer’s name, you may have to chase them for access, or pay to rebuild what you can’t get back. So before you hire anyone, ask how many of the websites they have built they still look after. If the answer is most of them, their clients stay with them, and they are likely to still be around when you need them.
Walk away when you hear these.
Red flags
- A guaranteed first place on Google. Nobody controls Google’s rankings, and anyone promising a position is misunderstanding it or misrepresenting it.
- The domain registered in the agency’s name. That is your address on the internet held as leverage.
- A proposal before any questions. If nobody asked what your business does, the proposal was written before you called.
- No price anywhere, and no range on the phone either. You cannot compare what you cannot see.
Want the rest of the list?
The full guide has the proposal checklist, how to read a quote, and what to listen for on the first phone call. Eight chapters, sent one at a time so you can read as you go.
Send me the eight-chapter guide
First name and email. No newsletter, and you can stop the emails at any point.
Take this list to anyone
Our answers to every question above are on this site: prices published, process described, ownership confirmed in writing.
And if you want the thinking without committing to a build, the plan is A$1,800, yours to take to any builder you like.
Free. 20 minutes. No proposal you did not ask for.
Not ready to talk? Read the long version first. Eight chapters on proposals, quotes and what to listen for on the first call. Send me the eight-chapter guide