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.
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.
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.
Selling online in NZ, legally
New Zealand has no single ecommerce statute. The rules come from four separate places, and the two that catch retailers most often are how prices are displayed and the fact that there is no change-of-mind right here at all.
NZ addresses and checkout
New Zealand addresses have no state, four-digit postcodes with meaningful leading zeros, and a rural delivery system that adds a surcharge invisible from the address itself. Most checkout forms are built elsewhere and fail on all three.
What a website costs in NZ
Published New Zealand market rates for every type of website, what drives the number up, and what you actually get at each level.
Australia
What a website costs in Australia
There is no independent survey of Australian web design pricing. Every guide currently ranking for this question is an agency marketing its own services. So rather than add another one, this page collects what they all publish, shows where they agree, and shows where they contradict each other by a factor of forty.
Australian law for websites
Australian website obligations changed materially in the last two years, and most published guides have not caught up. The maximum consumer law penalty doubled in March 2026, a privacy tort commenced in June 2025, and the cookie banners half the country runs are not required by any Australian law. Here is what is actually in force, sourced.