I look after it
Hosting, updates, backups and small changes handled for you, billed once a year. You email me when something needs changing and it gets changed.
Best if you'd rather never think about it again.
Website design · New Zealand-wide Your website shouldn't cost $700 a year just to sit there.
Site builders rent you your own business. You pay every month, forever, and the day you stop paying it all disappears. I build the site properly instead: you own it outright, and it runs for about a hundred dollars a year.
The maths
Where the money actually goes
A site-builder plan bundles hosting you could buy for $60 with software you're only renting. Here's a real comparison, from a client who moved off Wix this year.
Site builder subscription
~$700/year
- Charged every year, forever
- Stop paying and the site goes dark
- Locked to their editor and their export
- Slower: their code, not yours
A site you own
~$100/year
- Domain and hosting, that's it
- Paid to the host, not to me
- Yours to move or hand on anytime
- Built lean, so it loads fast
That's roughly $600 a year back in a small business's pocket, every year, for a site that's faster than the one it replaced. The build itself is quoted per project, once.
What's included
Built properly, not dragged together
Search groundwork, done right
Titles, descriptions, canonical URLs, sitemap, robots and structured data for every page. The plumbing that decides whether Google can make sense of you.
Fast by construction
No page-builder bloat, no twenty plugins. Compressed, cached and sized to load quickly on a phone with two bars of signal.
Works on the phone first
Most of your customers will find you on a phone, usually one-handed. The layout is designed for that, then scaled up to desktop.
Set up for local search
Business schema, service areas, opening hours and consistent contact details, so you turn up when someone nearby searches for what you do.
Migration without losing rankings
Moving off Wix or Squarespace? Content and domain come across and redirects are mapped, so the pages you already rank for don't turn into dead ends.
The keys, in your name
Domain registered to you, hosting account in your name, files handed over on request. No hostages, ever.
Case study
Coleman's Mobile Car Valet
An owner-operated mobile detailing business in Auckland, paying around $700 a year to Wix for a site that was slow and awkward to update. We rebuilt it from scratch: six pages, proper service and pricing markup, and hosting that costs about a seventh of what they were paying.
The new site answers in well under a tenth of a second, and every service they offer is marked up with its real price so search engines can read the whole menu, not just the words on the page.
Visit the site
~$600
saved per year
45ms
server response
11KB
homepage HTML
6
pages, each search-ready
After launch
Two ways to run it. Both fine by me.
You take the keys
I hand over the files, the domain and the hosting account, with notes on how it all fits together. No ongoing fee to me at all.
Best if you're technical, or you've got someone who is.
You can also start with one and switch to the other later. Picking the hand-over option doesn't cost you more, and it doesn't get you a worse site.
Questions
The things people ask first
Do I actually own the website?
Yes. The site is a set of files and a domain in your name. You can take them to any host in the world, or hand them to another developer, without asking anyone's permission. That's the whole point.
What does it cost to run each year?
Usually around $100 a year for a .co.nz domain and hosting combined, paid directly to the registrar and host rather than to me. There's no platform fee on top, because there's no platform.
Can you move my existing Wix or Squarespace site?
Yes, and it's a good chunk of the work I do. Your content and domain come across, the pages get rebuilt properly, and redirects are set up so the pages you already rank for keep their rankings instead of turning into dead links.
Do I need to be in Auckland?
No. The work is done remotely and clients can be anywhere in New Zealand. Email and a phone call cover almost everything, and I'm in the same time zone as you.
Who looks after the site once it's live?
Whichever you prefer, and you can change your mind later. I can host and maintain it for an annual fee, or hand the whole thing over so you or your own host runs it.
What happens if I stop working with you?
You keep the domain, the files and the content, and I'll help move them wherever you want them. Nothing is held hostage and nothing stops working. If that sounds like a low bar, compare it with what happens when you cancel a site-builder plan.
Get in touch
Tell me what you need
What the business does, roughly how many pages you're picturing, and whether you've got a site already. That's enough for me to come back with a number and a timeframe. No obligation, and no sales sequence waiting for you.
hello@sumnerd.co.nz