(Guides)

Everything we know, written down._

Practical guides on buying, building, and running a website, with a New Zealand focus. Every factual claim traces to a primary source listed at the foot of the page. Where the evidence is thin, we say so rather than filling the gap with confidence.

(Free tools)

AI visibility tracker

Measure whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and Copilot actually recommend your business. Ten prompts, scored per engine, about twenty minutes.

Website cost calculator

Estimate what your project would cost against published New Zealand market ranges. No email required.

Website health check

A 16-point self-audit across speed, trust, search visibility, and AI readiness. Runs entirely in your browser.

Buying a website

Choosing a web design agency

You are being asked to spend real money on something you cannot fully evaluate until it exists. This is what to ask, what the answers should sound like, and which warning signs reliably predict a project going wrong.

Website redesign checklist

A redesign that loses half your organic traffic is common, entirely avoidable, and almost never caused by the design. It is caused by skipping the unglamorous migration steps below.

Squarespace and Wix vs custom

An honest comparison of website builders against a custom build, including the cases where a builder is genuinely the right answer.

Search & AI

AI crawlers explained

There is no such thing as "the AI crawler". There are dozens, they do three completely different jobs, and blocking the wrong one makes your business invisible to ChatGPT or Copilot while blocking the right one saves you bandwidth and nothing else. This is the full reference, with the decision for each.

What AI actually cites

Most AEO advice is recycled guesswork, and several of its most repeated tactics are contradicted by the largest datasets available. This is what the published research supports, what it refutes, and where the honest uncertainty sits.

Schema markup explained

Structured data tells a machine what your page means rather than just what it says. It is genuinely useful, it is oversold as an AI tactic, and only a handful of the hundreds of available types are worth your time.

AI search visibility

How New Zealand businesses appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews, and what determines whether you are cited.

Running a website

Core Web Vitals explained

Three metrics, three thresholds, and a clear list of causes behind each. Core Web Vitals measure how a page feels to a real person on real hardware, which is why they resist the usual tricks.

New Zealand

Privacy Act 2020 for websites

If your website collects a name, an email address, or an IP address, the Privacy Act 2020 applies to you. Most New Zealand business sites are quietly non-compliant in the same three ways, and all three are straightforward to fix.

Web accessibility in NZ

Roughly a quarter of New Zealanders are disabled. Government agencies are required to meet a specific accessibility standard, private businesses are covered by the Human Rights Act more generally, and the common failures are cheap to fix if you catch them during design rather than after launch.

NZ hosting and data sovereignty

New Zealand now has two hyperscale cloud regions on shore, which changes the hosting calculation for the first time in a decade. Here is what onshore hosting genuinely gains you, with measured latency figures, and an honest account of what the law requires rather than what vendors imply it requires.