If you're an Australian founder about to commission your first website, there's a list of things you should have sorted before the studio starts work. Not because the studio can't do them, but because the founder owns most of them, and a project that starts without them ends up with a website that doesn't quite fit the business it was supposedly built for.

Our position: the right time to handle these is before you sign the build contract, not during week three when you realise you can't decide what the company is actually called. We've watched too many launches get delayed by two months because the founder hadn't registered the business name. We've also watched founders spend AU$8,000 on a site only to rebrand six months later because they didn't think hard enough about the name up front.

This is the eleven-item checklist we wish every first-time founder had before they reached out for a quote. None of it is hard. All of it costs less than fixing it after the fact.

The case for skipping the checklist

To be fair, plenty of founders launch successfully having ignored most of this. The "start scrappy, fix later" approach is legitimate. If you're trying to validate a business idea fast and the website is throwaway, this checklist is overkill.

The trap is mistaking the throwaway site for the launch site. If you're building the actual site you intend to run your business on for the next two years, the checklist matters. The cost of going back to fix these items after launch is between 5x and 10x what it costs to handle them before.

The middle path: validate scrappy on a Carrd or a Notion page. Then run the checklist before commissioning the real site.

1. Decide on the legal entity (or accept that you're a sole trader)

The first decision. You can trade as a sole trader, as a partnership, as a company (Pty Ltd), or as a trust. Each has different legal, tax, and liability implications, none of which are this blog's job to explain.

What matters for the website: the entity name and ABN/ACN appear in your terms of service, your privacy policy, your invoices, and often your domain registration. Changing the entity post-launch means rewriting all of those.

Talk to an accountant. If you're solo and bootstrapping, sole trader is often fine for year one and you can incorporate later. If you have a co-founder, you're raising money, or you have significant liability exposure, set up the Pty Ltd before you start the website project.

ASIC's company registration fee is currently AU$597. Sole trader registration via business.gov.au is free. Use ABN Lookup to confirm availability of trading names.

2. Register the business name (separate from the entity name)

If you're a sole trader trading under your personal name (e.g. "Sarah Chen Consulting" where Sarah Chen is your registered name), no separate business name registration is needed.

Otherwise, you register the business name with ASIC. The fee is AU$45 for one year or AU$104 for three years as of mid-2026. Renewals are required.

The thing to watch out for: business name registration doesn't give you trademark rights, exclusive domain rights, or any guarantee that someone else can't use the name in a different state or context. It just registers that you're trading under that name.

If the name is important to your brand, also consider trade mark registration via IP Australia. A standard trade mark in one class is roughly AU$330. Not strictly required, but worth thinking about before you spend money on a brand.

3. Lock down the domain

Domain decisions to make:

Which TLD. For an Australian business, .com.au is the default. The trust signal is real — Australian customers recognise .com.au as "an Australian business." .au (direct) became available in 2022 and is gaining ground. .com is fine if you have international ambitions, but be aware that customers in AU sometimes still default-search for the .com.au version.

ABN requirement. To register a .com.au or .au domain, you need an ABN or ACN. The domain name must match or be closely connected to your registered business name, trademark, or business activity (per auDA's rules).

Cost. Domain registration in Australia is roughly AU$15-30 per year for .com.au through retail registrars, plus a small auDA wholesale fee. There's no five-figure premium for non-premium domains; if you're being asked to pay AU$2,000 for a "domain" by a marketing agency, that's the agency's margin, not the actual cost.

Defensive registrations. Worth registering the obvious variants — .com, .au direct, common misspellings — to protect the brand. Total cost is usually under AU$200/year.

Register the domain in your own name (or the entity's), not the studio's. We've seen too many founders get locked out of their domain by an agency that registered it on their behalf.

4. Choose the brand name with the website in mind

This belongs on the checklist because a lot of founders pick a name without checking how it works as a website.

Things to test before locking the name:

Is the .com.au domain available?
Is the matching social media handle available on the platforms you care about?
Does the name read clearly when said over the phone? ("Yes, S-A-R-A-H-W-E-B")
Is it searchable? A name that's the same as a common phrase ("Apple", "Open", "Lift") is harder to rank for.
Is it trademark-distinct enough? IP Australia's trade mark search is free.

A name that's perfect in the brand strategy slide and impossible to find online is a problem you carry forever.

5. Get the legal pages drafted

Australian websites have legal requirements that aren't optional:

Privacy policy. Required under the Privacy Act 1988 if your business has annual turnover above AU$3 million, or if you handle health information, or if you sell personal information, or if you're a credit reporting body or contracted service provider. In practice: almost every business website needs one because almost every business website collects personal information via a contact form.

Terms of service. Required if you sell goods or services online. Must include Australian Consumer Law (ACL) compliance language. A blanket "no refunds" policy is illegal under ACL — you can't contract out of consumer guarantees.

Cookie policy and consent. Australia doesn't have GDPR-level cookie rules, but if you serve customers in the EU or UK, you need consent management.

The cheap version: lawyer-templated documents from Sprintlaw, LegalVision, or Lawpath for AU$200-500. Adequate for most early-stage businesses.

The expensive version: lawyer-drafted custom documents at AU$1,500-4,000. Worth it for businesses with specific legal exposure (health, finance, marketplaces).

Don't use a free generic template. The Australian-specific provisions almost certainly won't be in it.

6. Set up the business email

A you@brandname.com.au email address is non-negotiable for a credible business. A Gmail address is fine for a side project; for a real business, it isn't.

The cheap path: Google Workspace at roughly AU$10/user/month, or Microsoft 365 Business at similar pricing. Set up before the website launches so customers can email you immediately.

The trap: leaving this to the last week of the project. Email setup involves DNS records, sometimes domain transfer delays, and occasionally MX record troubleshooting. Sort it three weeks before launch, not three days.

7. Decide what the website actually has to do

This is the question most founders haven't answered clearly when they reach out to studios. "I need a website" isn't a brief.

The questions to answer:

What's the single most important action a visitor should take?
How will success be measured? (Inquiries per week? Bookings per month? Email signups?)
What does a customer journey look like, end-to-end? Where does the website fit?
Which pages are critical and which are nice-to-have?
What content will visitors expect to find that you don't have yet?

A studio that doesn't ask these questions is probably not going to design the right site. A founder who can't answer them is going to get a site that has the wrong shape.

Spend a Saturday afternoon writing this down before you send any quote requests. It will sharpen the brief and save weeks of back-and-forth.

8. Plan your analytics setup

This is the item most often skipped. The site launches, traffic arrives, and nobody is measuring anything meaningful.

What to set up before launch:

Google Analytics 4 for traffic and conversion tracking
Google Search Console for organic search performance
Microsoft Clarity for session recordings (it's free)
A defined set of conversion events (contact form submission, booking, purchase)

Set these up during the build, not after. Conversion events configured retroactively miss the first weeks of data, which are often the most informative.

9. Prepare the content (or hire someone to write it)

A AU$10,000 website project usually expects you to provide most of the copy. Many founders underestimate how much writing this is.

A standard five-page brochure site is typically 2,500-4,000 words of copy. If you can write, this takes a focused day or two. If you can't, hire a copywriter at AU$1,500-3,500 for the project.

Either way: have the copy 80% drafted before design starts. Designing around real copy produces dramatically better results than designing around lorem ipsum and bolting copy in afterwards.

10. Source the photography

Photography matters more on some sites than others. Hospitality, healthcare, beauty, and retail need strong original imagery. Professional services can often get away with smart use of stock.

If you need original photography, book the shoot before the build starts. Decent photographers in Australia run AU$1,500-3,500 for a half-day shoot. Lead time is typically 2-4 weeks. A project that's waiting on photography mid-build delays launch by weeks.

Stock photography that works: Unsplash and Pexels are free. Shutterstock and Adobe Stock have higher-quality paid options. Avoid the obviously over-used images — anyone in marketing has seen the "diverse team laughing around a laptop" shot a hundred times.

11. Plan the launch marketing (or accept that nobody will see the site)

This is the one founders most often miss. The website launches. Nothing happens. The founder is surprised.

A website with no incoming traffic is invisible. Plan the traffic before you launch:

An email to your existing network announcing the launch
A LinkedIn post (if relevant to your business)
Outreach to ten potential customers explicitly inviting them to visit
A small Google Ads test budget (AU$200-500) to drive initial traffic
Search Console submission and sitemap indexing on launch day

If you skip this, the site exists in a vacuum for the first 60-90 days while organic search slowly notices it. That's a long time to be staring at zero in the analytics dashboard.

The order that actually works

Roughly the timeline if you're starting from scratch:

Weeks -12 to -10: Entity setup, ABN, business name registration, brand name lock-in, trademark search
Weeks -10 to -8: Domain registration, defensive registrations, email setup
Weeks -8 to -6: Legal documents drafted, photography booked, copy plan finalised
Weeks -6 to -2: Copy written, photography shot, content collected
Week -2: Studio kickoff with everything ready
Weeks 0-6: Build
Week 7: Analytics setup, launch marketing scheduled
Week 8: Launch

You can compress this. We've helped founders launch in three weeks elapsed when the prep was done well. We've also seen founders take six months because the prep wasn't.

The one thing that's not on the list

Funding to spend more on the website. Most first websites do not need to cost more than AU$10,000. The temptation to over-invest in the first site is usually a sign of avoiding the harder work of validating the business.

Build affordable. Validate. Reinvest later.

If you want help working out which of the eleven items you've actually got covered and which ones you haven't, get in touch. We'll walk through it before we quote, so the project starts properly.

Pre-Launch Website Checklist: 11 Things to Lock Down