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Web design in Christchurch.
Squarespace sites for Canterbury businesses, built light enough to load properly at the end of a rural broadband line.
Page weight matters more in Canterbury
A lot of Canterbury's money is outside the city limits, and a lot of that customer base is still on rural broadband or a patchy mobile signal somewhere past Darfield. A site that feels instant in Riccarton can be unusable in Hororata.
This is a real constraint and most designers ignore it, because they test on fast connections in a city. I build light by default: compressed images, no video backgrounds, no font stack that loads six weights, and no tracking scripts stacked up behind the page. Fast sites also rank better, so it helps twice.
What Canterbury businesses usually need
Trades and construction
The biggest group by some distance, and the one with the most dated sites. What works is photographs of finished jobs, a plainly stated service area, and a quote form that can be filled in on a phone with one hand.
Agricultural and rural services
Contractors, suppliers and agritech serving farms across the plains. Light pages, clear product information, and phone numbers that are easy to find.
Manufacturing and trade supply
Businesses selling to other businesses, where the site's job is to prove you are real, capable and still trading before anyone picks up the phone.
Growth-town retail and services
Rolleston, Lincoln, Rangiora and Kaiapoi have added a lot of households and not many good local websites. It is the least contested corner of the region.
Replacing a rebuild-era website
If your site went up between 2012 and 2016 it is probably costing you work. It probably looks dated, but the bigger problem is that it was built before most people browsed on phones and before Google cared about speed.
The usual signs: you cannot edit it yourself, the person who built it has moved on, it takes several seconds to load, and the contact form either does not work or goes to an email nobody checks. Rebuilding on Squarespace fixes all four at once, and hands you something you can update yourself afterwards.
A one page site is $2,400 and a five to seven page business site is $3,900, both fixed and quoted in writing before anything starts. Most go live two to four weeks after your content is ready.
Common questions
Do you travel to Christchurch?
For a project that warrants it, yes, though most Canterbury work runs fine over Zoom and email. For a $2,400 site the airfare does not make sense for either of us, and the work is no worse without it.
Can you keep the site fast for rural customers?
Yes, and I build that way as standard rather than as an extra. Compressed images, minimal scripts and no video backgrounds. If a meaningful share of your customers are rural, tell me at the quote and I will test against a throttled connection before launch.
What about businesses in Rolleston, Lincoln or Rangiora?
Same service and same price. Those towns don't have many good local websites yet, and they search as their own places rather than as Christchurch, which is worth building into the site from the start.
I already have a site. Can you just improve it?
Sometimes. If it is a reasonably recent Squarespace site, yes, and that is cheaper than starting again. If it is a rebuild-era WordPress site held together with expired plugins, a rebuild usually costs less than the repair. I will look before quoting either way.