Web design services in Australia: the separate pieces

A website project is usually sold as one thing with one figure at the bottom of it. Underneath that figure it is several separate pieces of work, done by different skills, on different timelines, and each one can be bought on its own. Design is not development. Development is not writing. Writing is not the upkeep that starts the day after launch. Suppliers bundle them because bundling is easier to sell and easier to schedule, not because the pieces are inseparable.

This section takes the bundle apart and describes each piece as a thing you can commission, brief and judge by itself.

What is in this section

What a small business actually needs is the whole job at its most common scale: a site of a few pages that has to be found, understood and contacted. That page is about the work itself, how to scope it from demand rather than from your list of capabilities, and how to brief it so the quotes you receive are comparable.

who writes the words is the words, treated as a piece of work rather than as a form to fill in. It is also the single most common reason a build stalls, which is why it appears here as a separate purchase rather than as a line item somebody hopes you will not notice.

Landing page design is one page built for one purpose, usually because you are paying for the traffic arriving on it. It has different rules to the rest of a site and a much shorter feedback loop.

Shopify explained is a build on a hosted commerce platform, where a large part of the job is configuration rather than construction, and where the ongoing platform costs sit entirely outside the build.

Website design services and web development services are the two ongoing arrangements rather than one-off projects. A project ends; a service continues, and suppliers use the word for three quite different things without saying which.

Squarespace explained is a build on a hosted platform where a large part of the job is judgement rather than construction.

What a website design company actually is covers the supplier types hiding behind one label, and ecommerce website design in Australia covers what an Australian online store carries that a generic build does not.

If the engineering half of the work is what your project turns on rather than the visual half, development work in Brisbane covers that separately.

Web design agency, freelance and in-house services in Australia

Every piece in this section can be bought from a web design agency, a freelancer or built in-house, and the label on the supplier matters less than which of these pieces they are actually equipped to do well. A design agency selling itself as full service usually subcontracts at least one piece — copy, photography or ongoing digital marketing — and is not always upfront about which. Checking a supplier’s client reviews for the specific piece you need, not the agency’s brand as a whole, tells you more than a portfolio spanning unrelated industries and projects. A trusted supplier is one whose past client work you can verify, not one whose homepage says trusted.

Why the pieces are separable

Each of these has a different unit of work behind it. Copy is priced per page and paced by how quickly you can answer questions. Design is priced per unique layout, not per page. Development is priced by how many of those layouts are unusual and how much has to connect to something else. Configuration on a hosted platform is priced by how many settings, rates and rules your business actually needs. Upkeep is priced per month and never stops.

Because the units differ, a supplier who sells all of it as one number is averaging across four different risks. Sometimes that average is in your favour. Sometimes you are paying for a piece you already have.

When buying the pieces separately is right

Buy separately when you already hold one of the pieces to a decent standard. If you have a writer who knows your business, commissioning design and build without copy is straightforward and the saving is real. Buy separately when only one piece is broken: a site that works but reads badly needs a copywriter, not a rebuild. Buy separately when the work has a deadline of its own, such as a landing page for a campaign that starts in three weeks while the main site is months away. And buy separately when you want to test a supplier on something small before handing over the whole project.

When buying separately is a false economy

It stops being sensible at the point where somebody has to hold the pieces together, and that somebody becomes you.

Split work creates seams. A designer who has not seen the copy designs for the length of text they imagine, and real copy never arrives at that length. A writer with no wireframe writes prose for a page whose structure has not been decided. A developer given both, from two suppliers who have not spoken, resolves the contradictions by guessing. The rework that follows is charged at somebody’s hourly rate, and it usually exceeds whatever was saved by unbundling.

The rule of thumb: separate pieces that have a clean handover, and keep together pieces that argue with each other. Copy and structure argue. Design and development argue. Upkeep argues with nothing and can always be bought separately, or moved later.

How this section relates to pricing

These pages are about the work. the pricing index is about the money attached to it: what moves the figure in a quote, what gets removed to reach a fixed-scope packages figure, and maintenance as a recurring line once the build is finished. Read a services page to work out what you are asking for. Read a pricing page to work out whether the answer you get back is reasonable, and to check that GST treatment is stated rather than assumed. For what web design covers as a discipline before you split it into pieces, start with web design in Australia.