What to ask a web development company in Perth before you sign: who builds it, which platform, what happens to your rankings, and who owns the site.
Most Perth businesses only buy a website every few years, so it is hard to know what a good quote looks like. Two web development companies can quote very different numbers for what sounds like the same site. This is how we would compare them: what you are actually buying, the questions worth asking, and the things that go wrong after launch when nobody asked.
A website quote usually bundles four different jobs. It helps to pull them apart.
Looks are the easiest part to judge and the least of what matters. The structure and the launch are where most of the value is won or lost. You can see how we approach web design and development in Perth on our web design page.
The person on the sales call is often not the person doing the work, and some agencies send the build offshore. Ask who designs it, who builds it and who you talk to when something needs changing. With us, Kobi and Harvie design and build every site themselves.
A good answer is about your business, not about what the agency happens to prefer. We build service business sites in Webflow and online stores in Shopify, and our guide to Webflow, WordPress or Shopify walks through the choice. Be wary of a custom built system only one company can maintain.
You should be able to change text, swap images and add a page or a product without paying for every edit. Ask to see the editor you will be using.
If your old site gets traffic from Google, every page worth keeping needs to be mapped to its new address and redirected at launch. Skip that step and rankings that took years to earn can go in a week. A technical SEO audit before the move shows what has to be kept.
Page structure, headings, titles, schema and site speed are far cheaper to get right during the build than to fix afterwards. Ask what is included. Ongoing SEO in Perth is separate work, and a builder should say so plainly.
You should. The domain should be registered in your name, the platform account should be yours, and your analytics should sit in your own accounts. If you part ways, everything stays with you.
Hosting, platform fees, plugin licences and maintenance are all ongoing costs, and they differ a lot between platforms. Ask for the yearly figure, not just the build price.
For the sites we build, usually 1 to 4 weeks. What moves it is how many pages the site needs, whether it is a store, and how ready the content and images are. Content is the most common delay on any web project, so a company that asks about it early is doing you a favour.
There is no honest single number. Every website we build is scoped to the project: how many pages it needs, whether it is a store, and how much design and content work is involved. A five page site for a trade business and a Shopify store with a few hundred products are different jobs.
When you compare quotes, compare the scope line by line. The cheaper quote is often the one that left out the redirects, the content or the mobile work.
Zealous Productions is a Perth theatre company. We designed and built their website and a landing page for the show, and ran the ticket ads as well, so the page and the campaign were planned as one thing.
The method is in the Zealous Productions case study.
Design is how the site looks and reads. Development is building it so it works. For most small business sites one company, and often one person, should do both, because splitting them is where things get lost.
Either can be right. What matters is who does the work, whether they will be around in two years, and whether the site is built on something another developer could pick up.
Look at what the current site is doing first. If pages rank and bring enquiries, keep what works and rebuild around it. Starting from nothing is only cheaper if there was nothing worth keeping.
