How much does a website cost in Darwin?

What you are actually paying for

Website quotes vary by an order of magnitude for apparently similar briefs, which makes the market look irrational. It is not. Four things drive nearly all of the variation, and a quote that has not established them is a guess.

• Number of unique page layouts, not number of pages. Twenty pages sharing three templates is a small job. Six pages each designed individually is a larger one.
• Who writes the content. This is the most underestimated line by a wide margin. A build waiting on copy that never arrives is the single most common reason website projects run months late.
• Whether anything transacts. A site that informs is straightforward. The moment it takes a booking, a payment or a login, you have added security, failure handling and testing obligations that do not exist on a brochure site.
• Whether it must talk to another system. Pushing an enquiry into a CRM, syncing stock, pulling availability from a calendar — each connection is a small project with its own failure modes.

The four tiers you will be quoted

NTDG publishes an entry point from $499 for a straightforward build, which sits in the first two tiers depending on scope. Anything transactional or integrated is quoted against the actual requirement, because the honest range for that work is too wide to advertise.

What the cheap end genuinely leaves out

A very low fixed price is not necessarily poor value — for a business that needs a credible presence and a contact form, a template build is often exactly right. But it is worth knowing what is usually not included, because these surface later as either disappointments or invoices.

• Content. Writing the words about your business is skilled work and is usually your responsibility at this price.
• Search visibility beyond the basics. The structural fundamentals may be present; the ongoing work of actually ranking is a separate service.
• Any maintenance. The site is handed over working. Keeping it working is not included unless stated.
• Accessibility testing. Increasingly an expectation rather than a nicety, particularly for anyone doing government or tender work.

The costs that never stop

Independent of the build, three things recur: a domain name annually, hosting monthly or annually, and maintenance. Only the third is negotiable, and declining it is a decision rather than a saving — see what website maintenance actually includes for what you are opting out of.

The two questions that protect you

Ask who will own the domain, the hosting account and the code at the end, and get the answer in writing. A build where those sit in the builder’s accounts is substantially cheaper to produce and substantially more expensive to leave.

Then ask what happens after launch — specifically, what a change costs, how quickly something broken gets fixed, and whether there is any arrangement at all. A business whose site cannot be updated without a quote tends to stop updating it, and a site nobody updates is why the five-year-old website with last year’s prices on it is such a familiar thing.