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Web design in Auckland.
The same Squarespace site an Auckland agency would quote you five figures for, at a published price, from Wellington.
What Auckland agencies charge, and why
A small business site from an Auckland agency commonly lands somewhere between $8,000 and $25,000. Sometimes that is justified. Often what arrives at the end is a content managed site that does roughly what a well built Squarespace site does.
The difference is mostly overhead. An agency carries a studio in Ponsonby or Newmarket, a producer, an account manager, a designer and a developer, and a proposal process that costs money before anyone starts work. You are paying for that structure whether or not your project needs it.
A five to seven page business site from me is $3,900, fixed, quoted in writing before anything starts and published on the pricing page so you can check it before you call. One page sites are $2,400. If your project genuinely needs an agency, which some do, I will tell you that rather than take the job.
Remote works fine in Auckland
Hiring someone local in Auckland doesn't mean you'll see much of them. Crossing town for a one hour meeting can eat the afternoon, so Auckland agencies do most of it on Zoom too.
So the real difference between hiring me and hiring a studio twenty minutes away, in traffic, is smaller than it sounds. You get a call at the start, a design to review, one round of changes, and a walkthrough at the end. The difference is that the person on the call is the person building the site.
If you genuinely want someone in the room, hire an Auckland studio. That is a real thing to want and I am not going to argue you out of it.
Built to be found in your part of town
Auckland's size changes how a site should be structured. A single page that says "serving Auckland" competes with everyone. Pages that name the suburbs you actually work in compete with your neighbours, which is a far smaller field.
So every Auckland build I do includes the service area structure from the start: the suburbs you cover, written properly rather than stuffed into a footer list, and page titles that match how people in those suburbs search. It costs nothing extra at build time and is expensive to retrofit later.
Common questions
How much should a small business website cost in Auckland?
Less than most quotes you will get. My prices are $2,400 for a one page site, $3,900 for five to seven pages and from $5,600 for a store, all fixed and published. Auckland agency quotes for comparable work commonly run three to five times that, largely because of overheads your project may not need.
Will you meet me in Auckland?
For a project that warrants the trip, yes. For most builds we'll use Zoom, which is how most Auckland agencies work anyway because of the traffic.
Can you handle a site in more than one language?
Squarespace can do it, but it has limits, and I'll go through them with you before we start. For a genuinely multilingual site with a lot of content there are better platforms, and I'll point you to one.
Do you build online stores?
Yes, Squarespace commerce from $5,600, set up with products, shipping rules, payments and the tax settings people usually get wrong. For a large catalogue with unusual pricing rules, Shopify is the better answer and I will say so.