Web developer in Wellington

Most sites I am asked to look at in Wellington are not badly built. They are badly prioritised — enormous effort on the parts nobody reads and none on the parts that decide whether someone gets in touch. The fix is rarely more work; it is the same work pointed somewhere else.

One thing worth knowing about building for New Zealand

New Zealand businesses are usually competing against Australian sites in the same search results, which means the build has to signal local trust hard — NZBN, local address, NZD pricing above the fold — or it loses the click before the page is read.

Why Wellington sites are built to be edited by you

A site you cannot update is a site that decays. Prices go stale, staff leave, the opening hours are wrong for six months. So the parts of a Wellington build that change often — text, images, prices, opening hours, team members — are editable by you without touching code or paying me.

That is a design decision with a cost: it takes longer to build an editable block than a hard-coded one. It is worth it because the alternative is a maintenance dependency that benefits me and not you, and a developer whose income depends on you being unable to change your own opening hours is not aligned with your interests.

Education and training providers in Wellington

Course pages are the whole site. Each needs the outcome, the duration, the price, the prerequisites and the next start date visible without scrolling — and each needs to be its own indexable URL, because people search for the course, never for a training provider they have not heard of.

The recurring failure is a single "Courses" page listing twenty courses. It ranks for nothing because it is specifically about nothing. Twenty pages, each genuinely about one course, is more work and is the difference between a site that recruits and a brochure that sits there.

A mobile layout nobody tested on a real phone

Desktop-first builds fail in predictable places: a navigation menu that cannot be closed, a table forcing the whole page sideways, tap targets too close together, and a sticky banner sitting over the button. Each one is invisible on a laptop and each one loses customers.

Most visitors to a Wellington small business site arrive on a phone, so I design at phone width first and widen from there. That ordering is not a stylistic preference — it is the only way the small screen gets the attention the majority of your traffic deserves.

Hiring a developer who is not in Wellington

Currency is worth being blunt about. Quoting a New Zealand client in NZD and then invoicing something else at a rate that moved is a way of raising the price quietly, and it is common enough that you should ask any overseas supplier about it directly. The number agreed at scoping is the number invoiced, and exchange-rate movement is my problem rather than yours.

What I am not claiming about Wellington

A location page is the easiest place on a website to imply something untrue, so here is the other side of it plainly:

• I have no office, postal address or phone number in Wellington
• I cannot meet you in person, and if that is a requirement you should hire locally
• I am not claiming existing clients in Wellington specifically — my live work is listed on the work page and you can check it
• Nothing on this page is a guarantee of search rankings, which no developer can honestly offer

Wellington web development — common questions

Who owns the website when it is finished?

You do, completely. The domain is registered in your name, hosting sits in your account, the code lives in a repository you control, and any payment provider account is opened in your business name. Credentials are handed to you as they are created rather than at the end, so you are never locked out of your own site.

What currency will I be invoiced in?

NZD. Quotes, milestones and the final invoice are all written in NZD so you are never comparing a converted figure against a local supplier's. Regarding tax: GST at 15% on your sales; imported services from me are zero-rated.

Do you actually work with businesses in Wellington?

Yes, remotely. I work with New Zealand clients from Islamabad, quoting in NZD and invoicing in NZD. I have no office, address or phone number in Wellington and will not pretend otherwise. If your project needs someone physically present, hire locally — I will say so in the first reply rather than after a deposit.

Do I need to provide the content and images?

Content, yes — you know your business and I do not. I will restructure and edit what you send so it reads for the web, and I will tell you where a section is missing. Photography is worth paying a local photographer for; stock images of people in offices are recognisable as stock and quietly cost you credibility.

What hours will you be available to us in Wellington?

Honestly: very little, by default. My standard day lands at 17:00–02:00 your time, which barely touches a Wellington working day. So New Zealand projects run on a deliberately shifted schedule — I commit in writing to a fixed daily window that falls inside your morning, plus asynchronous written updates you can read before you start. If a supplier in your own timezone is what you need, that is a legitimate reason to hire locally.

How long does a Wellington project actually take?

Three days for a business site, seven for a store, ten for a custom application. That holds because the process is fixed rather than improvised and because your content exists on day one. What stretches a build is almost never the code — it is waiting for copy, logos and photographs, so those are requested before the clock starts.

What payment methods can my Wellington checkout accept?

For New Zealand: Stripe, POLi, and Windcave where a local gateway is already in place. The right combination depends on your average basket and your customers, and picking wrong is expensive — the payment method a buyer expects but cannot find is one of the most common reasons a checkout is abandoned at the final step.

Where this page sits

This page covers Wellington. Every other town in New Zealand is listed on the New Zealand coverage page, and the full worldwide list is at all locations.

Before you enquire: pricing is published rather than quoted on request, how I work covers the process end to end, the work page lists live client sites you can open, and vendor information answers the procurement questions.