Web Design in Keysborough

If you take fewer than a handful of orders a week, a brochure site with a contact/order form or a payment link costs half as much and launches faster. Move to full e-commerce (cart, inventory, shipping rules) when order volume makes manual handling the bottleneck.

Use a builder if your budget is minimal and your needs are a brochure plus contact form. Hire a freelancer for a custom site with some business logic. Pay agency rates when you need strategy, copywriting, SEO and design under one contract with accountability. Many small businesses outgrow a builder in year one — budget for that path.

Five that separate pros from dabblers: Can I see 3 live sites you built and still maintain? Who actually does the work — you or subcontractors? Will I own the domain, hosting and code? What's included in the price and what costs extra? What happens if I want changes after launch?

A proper quote itemizes: number of pages, responsive/mobile behavior, number of revision rounds (2-3 is standard), CMS setup, basic on-page SEO (titles, metas, sitemap), browser testing, and what happens to hosting and domain after handover. If a quote is one line with one number, ask for the breakdown.

No contract, no portfolio of live sites, registering the domain in their own name, 'free' websites with mandatory monthly fees, 100% payment up front, and guaranteed #1 Google rankings. The domain-ownership trap is the costliest — walking away can mean losing your web address.

A 5-page small-business site takes 2-6 weeks with a responsive client; e-commerce adds 2-4 weeks. The most common delay is not the designer — it's the client's content. Have your text, photos and logo ready before kickoff and you'll cut the timeline roughly in half.

Freelancers charge roughly AUD 60-150/hr; basic sites run AUD 700-3,000, small-business sites AUD 2,000-9,000, and e-commerce from AUD 5,000. GST (10%) may or may not be included in quotes — always ask.

You need an ABN/ACN to hold a .com.au, and the domain must be registered to YOUR entity, not your designer's. Verify ownership in the auDA registry after launch — reclaiming a designer-held domain later is slow and sometimes impossible.