FAQs
What it costs, what's included, who owns what, and what happens if you leave, answered in plain English.
The questions we get asked most
Straight answers on what it costs, how we get started, and who owns what. If your question isn't here, ask us and we'll answer it just as plainly.
Three monthly plans, with no build fee: your first monthly payment starts the plan. Starter is $200 a month for a five-page site, with your Google Business Profile set up and optimised. Business is $300 for up to ten pages and a blog. Growth is $500 for up to fifteen pages, an editor so you can change the words yourself, and the integrations you need.
Every plan includes the build, the words, hosting, unlimited changes, and the two of us looking after it for as long as you're with us. Prices exclude GST. If you're comparing quotes, we've set out what a website costs in New Zealand, from $499 templates to agency builds.
Count the pages you need: usually home, about, contact, and one for each service you want found on its own. Five or fewer is Starter. If you want a blog, or a page for each of several services, that's Business. If you want to change the words and photos yourself, that's Growth.
If you're not sure, start smaller. When you outgrow a plan, you move up to the next one.
Six months on every plan, then it's month to month.
Six months is enough to prove the site works. The build takes two to four weeks, so by the end of the term it has been live for most of five months. In that time we've run it and made whatever changes came up, and you've had the monthly numbers, so both of us know whether it's bringing in work. After that you stay because it's working, and for no other reason.
On every plan we build the site, write the words, host it, make every change you ask for and fix anything broken within two working days, and you can ring and get one of us. We set you up to be found on Google: titles, descriptions, headings and the code that tells search engines what each page is about, plus your Google Business Profile, set up and optimised so you can show on Google Maps. The profile is free from Google and stays yours; we're only its manager. We also set up Google Search Console, so every page can show in search and Google tells us about any problems. We keep it running, with a check every five minutes, a speed re-test every month and a monthly email with your numbers. You also get spam-filtered forms, a preview image for when your link is shared, an email address on your domain, and an optional redesign every three years, at no extra cost.
Business adds a blog, one integration and changes made within three working days.
Growth adds an editor for the words and photos, the integrations you need, your own analytics dashboard (Umami, which uses no cookies), a fuller monthly report with the Google searches that found you, and changes within two working days.
One invoice, the same amount every month. Nothing gets added on because you asked for a change, and you keep the price you joined on. If our costs ever forced a rise, you'd get 90 days' notice and could leave before it started.
The day you accept your plan and pay for the first month. That first payment covers the rest of the month you start in, and work starts once it's in. From then on the fee is paid on the 1st of each month.
The six-month minimum is that part-month plus six full months, so you know the date it ends from day one. The terms have the detail.
Nothing inside your plan. Starter covers five pages, Business ten, Growth fifteen, and the price is the same every month whatever you ask us to change. Outgrow the one you're on and you move up a plan rather than buy pages one at a time.
Work outside your plan, like building something new rather than changing what's there, is charged by the hour, and you get the price before we start, not on an invoice afterwards. Prices are in NZD and exclude GST.
You'd start a fresh six-month term. The site has to go back up and be looked after again, so it's a new arrangement rather than picking up where you left off.
Until you've approved the home page design in writing, yes. Walk away for any reason and you get every payment back.
Once the design is approved there are no refunds. The work's been done by then, so if something's wrong we'd sooner fix it than argue about it.
We charge no late fee and no interest. If a payment fails, Stripe retries it, and if it's still unpaid after about a week we remind you. Two weeks overdue, changes to your site pause until you've paid. After that we give you written notice and ten working days before the site is suspended, and only after another month unpaid could we end the agreement.
Pay what's owed and everything comes back. If we did have to end the agreement inside the six-month minimum, we could claim what we lose for the rest of it, less what we save by no longer running your site.
If money gets tight, tell Craig before any of that; we'd far rather sort something out.
Answers to a short questionnaire about your business, and a folder of photos.
It asks what you do and for whom, who you are and why you got into it, what sets you apart from the other lot, any numbers from your years in the trade, what you want someone to know in their first five seconds on the site, and which services make you the most money, because those get their own sections and, on the bigger plans, their own pages.
Then we plan the site around what your customers are looking for and write every page for the people you want ringing you, in words they'd use, rather than about you.
Yes, and you won't have to explain which bit you mean.
While we're building it, you get a working copy of the site that nobody else can see. Tap the part you want changed, type what you'd like instead, and the comment sits on that spot. Craig answers underneath it and marks it done when we've made the change.
Yes. A check runs against your site every five minutes, day and night, and we're alerted within minutes if it stops answering.
Once a month we also run it through Google's speed test again, and if the score has slipped under 90 we fix whatever caused it.
Yes, on every plan: once a month, in an email. It says, in plain English, how many visits your site had, how many times your phone number or email address was tapped, and how many times the form was sent. On Starter and Business there's no dashboard to log into and nothing to interpret. Growth adds your own dashboard, so you can look whenever you like. Growth's email counts people rather than visits and lists the Google searches that brought them to the site.
Yes. We set up an address like hello@yourbusiness.co.nz and forward it to the inbox you already use, at no extra cost. If you already have email running on the domain, we leave that exactly as it is.
It doesn't have to. Every three years while you're with us, you can have the site redesigned at no extra cost: a new look and a new structure, at the page count you're on. We'll tell you when it's due, and you decide whether and when to take it. If you're happy with the design you have, keep it; the redesign waits until you want it.
If the new version needs more pages than your plan allows, you move up a plan, the same as any other time.
Two to four weeks for most sites, and the main variable is you. The build waits on your answers, your photos and your sign-off, so the faster those come back, the faster it goes live.
No. Every site is custom code. That's a large part of why they load quickly and don't break: no stack of plugins to keep updating, and very little on them for anyone to get at.
It's lighter, so it loads faster. There's no database, so there's far less for anyone to break into. And nothing needs patching every week just to stay safe.
The trade is that changes come through us, or through a simple editor on Growth, rather than a drag-and-drop page builder, which is exactly what the monthly fee covers.
There's very little on it to hack. Your site has no database and no login page, and that's where most small business sites get broken into.
A WordPress site running a dozen plugins has a dozen ways in if they aren't kept patched. Nothing online is ever impossible to break, but this is about as small a target as a website gets.
Yes, and we check rather than assume. Colour contrast, keyboard navigation, screen reader labelling and heading structure all get tested before the site goes live.
About one in four New Zealanders lives with a disability, so a site that shuts them out is turning away real customers.
Five on Starter, which covers most small businesses: home, about, services, contact, and one more for whatever you need.
Ten on Business, which suits you if you want a page for each service so they have a chance of ranking on their own. Fifteen on Growth, for a business with a lot of ground to cover.
Need a sixth page on Starter? That's when it's worth moving up.
Fast enough to score 90 or better out of 100 on Google's speed test on a phone, which is where most of your customers will find you. Nothing goes live below that.
A site can feel quick on your own wifi and still score badly on a phone, so go by the number: check yours on Google's speed test, or run the free report on the site you have now.
Yes, on Business and Growth. Starter doesn't come with one, so a blog is one of the reasons people move up. Once it's set up, putting posts on it counts as one of your changes.
No. We build the kind of site that tells people what you do and gets them to ring you. If you need a proper shop with a cart and stock levels, you want someone who does Shopify. We'd rather say that up front than take the job and do it badly.
No. We're based at Gulf Harbour and work with small businesses all over New Zealand. Most of it happens over email and the phone, the same as it would if we were down the road.
The groundwork is, on every plan, and it's the part most sites get wrong: a fast site, a clean page structure, and the on-page setup done properly. That means titles, descriptions, headings, the code behind the page that tells Google what it's about, and a preview image for when your link is shared.
Every plan gets your Google Business Profile set up and optimised too, so you turn up on Google Maps. Ranking for competitive searches on top of that is a separate job, and a much bigger one.
Six to twelve months, usually. The sites already sitting at the top have often been at it for years, and catching them takes time. Anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing, or selling.
Yeah, nah, and neither can anyone else. Google sends people to sites it already trusts, and that trust gets built over months. You'll get calls from people promising the top spot inside three months; if it were that easy, every business would be number one.
A good site in a small local market with little competition can move up within a few months, where a crowded one takes longer, and how long is Google's call and nobody else's.
What we can promise is the part we control: a fast site, the on-page setup done properly, and the right words on the right pages. If someone promises you page one by next month, ask them to put it in writing.
Mostly writing. Pages that properly answer the questions your customers are typing into Google, so Google has a reason to send them to you. The technical side matters, but it's the smaller half of the job.
You hold a licence to use the site while you're with us, and we keep the design and code. That's what lets us charge no build fee: if the code were yours from the first month, there'd be nothing to stop anyone taking a full build for one payment and walking off with it.
Owning it changes less than it sounds like it should. The site is custom-built, so anything beyond changing words and photos takes someone who works in code. That's what the monthly is for: we stay around, make the changes, work alongside your marketing or SEO people, and keep the site in one piece.
Your domain name stays registered in your name, always. We'd rather say that now than have you find out later.
No. The fee is a licence to use the site, and when it ends the site comes down. What's yours stays yours: the domain name, your photos, anything else you gave us to build with, and the words we wrote about your business, which you can keep using wherever you like. The design and the code stay with us.
Yes, and we'll work with them. Send through what they want changed and we'll do it. There's nothing a WordPress site can do that we can't do on yours.
Email or ring and ask. Changes are included in the monthly fee and made within five working days on Starter, three on Business and two on Growth; if something's broken, it's fixed within two working days of your telling us, on every plan.
You'll be talking to one of the two of us rather than a ticket queue.
On Growth you can also change the words and photos yourself in a simple editor. Everything else we do ourselves because it's custom code: quicker for us to do than for you to learn, and less chance of something breaking.
Changing text, swapping images, updating your hours or your prices, fixing something that's broken. All of that is covered, as often as you like, on every plan.
A new page is covered too, up to your plan's page count; past that, you move up a plan.
If you're not sure which side of the line something sits on, ask, and you'll get the answer before any work happens.
Inside the first six months, stopping early doesn't end the term: your notice takes effect at the end of the six months, the site stays up and looked after until then, and the rest of the six months is still owed.
After that you can stop with 30 days' notice, and since the subscription is what keeps the site hosted and looked after, the site comes down when it ends. Your domain name stays registered in your name.
If money gets tight, tell us before it gets to that point. We'd far rather sort something out than chase an invoice.