Dunedin's hand-coding web studio.
Pryce Digital builds custom-coded, high-performance websites for Dunedin businesses. We work with clients from the Octagon and North Dunedin to Mosgiel, St Clair and out across Otago — and we don't ship templates. Every site is hand-coded in React and Next.js, built for a city where the University, the hospital and a long heritage manufacturing base anchor an economy that's quietly produced some of New Zealand's most distinctive brands.
Published by Pryce Digital · Hand-coded from Melbourne · Serving Dunedin, Otago
A studio that actually understands Dunedin.
Serving all of Dunedin.
We work with businesses across greater Dunedin and the wider Otago coast — professional services and creative studios around the Octagon, university-adjacent operators in North Dunedin, hospitality and lifestyle brands at St Clair and St Kilda, residential-suburb retail in Roslyn, Maori Hill and Mornington, scientific and industrial firms across Andersons Bay and Mosgiel, and port and logistics operators at Port Chalmers. Whichever part of the harbour basin you operate from, the same hand-coded standard applies.
We also work with New Zealand clients remotely — same timezone, same communication standards as if we were in the room.
What we build for Dunedin businesses
Dunedin's economy is held up by four anchors most other New Zealand cities can't match — a top-tier research university, a tertiary teaching hospital, a heritage manufacturing base and a small-but-serious scientific sector. The web design demands across those categories are sharper and more technical than provincial New Zealand averages. Here's how we approach the industries we build for most in this city.
Education & Research
The University of Otago is New Zealand's oldest and one of its most internationally recognised — and around it sits a research and education cluster (Otago Polytechnic, independent research institutes, education-services providers) that operates at international scale. Sites in this category sell to prospective students, research partners and grant-funding bodies often in three audiences at once. We build with content depth that earns research credibility, programme finders that don't bury the application, accessibility scores in the high 90s (compliance matters at this scale), and Schema markup for course and event types.
Health & Medical
Dunedin Hospital and the surrounding cluster of specialist practices, allied health providers, diagnostic services and medical-tech firms make health one of the city's largest sectors. The audience expects authority signalling, calm visual language and rigorous accessibility — and template medical sites consistently fail to deliver any of the three. We build practice and clinic sites with practitioner profiles that earn referral trust, online booking that integrates with practice management systems, accessibility compliance for the over-65 audience that dominates many practices, and patient-facing content that doesn't read like marketing copy.
Scientific & Biotech
Dunedin punches above its size in scientific and biotech research — university spinouts, AgResearch-adjacent firms, marine science (Portobello), pharmaceutical research and a small but rising medical-device sector. Sites in this category are usually selling to a B2B audience of researchers, investors and procurement professionals who want specifications, publications, regulatory compliance and team credibility surfaced fast. We build research and biotech sites that treat the technical reader as the primary audience without alienating non-specialist visitors.
Hospitality & Heritage Lifestyle
Dunedin's hospitality scene runs on heritage — the Octagon's Edwardian and Victorian stock, the rebirth of Bond Street and Princes Street, the lifestyle category emerging through St Clair and the coast. The city has produced disproportionately strong food and craft beverage brands (Emerson's, Speights legacy, distillers, roasteries) that sell nationally and increasingly internationally. We build hospitality and craft-brand sites that hold the heritage-led visual language Dunedin trades on without going twee, plus e-commerce that handles real export volume for the brands that have outgrown the city.
Manufacturing & Engineering
Dunedin retains a manufacturing base — engineering firms, specialist fabrication, food production, electronics — that pre-dates the post-industrial NZ narrative and is still meaningfully active. These businesses sell to B2B procurement, often to Australian and international clients, and the website has to do credibility work that template builders can't deliver. We build manufacturing sites with real facility photography, capability matrices that read on a phone, certifications surfaced (ISO, AS/NZS, industry-specific compliance), and lead capture tuned for procurement enquiries, not retail shoppers.
Tourism & Heritage Experience
Dunedin's tourism category is heritage-led (Otago Museum, Toitū, Larnach Castle, the railway), wildlife-led (Royal Albatross Centre, the Peninsula's penguins and seals) and increasingly cruise-driven through Port Chalmers. Operators here compete for visitor decisions made days or weeks before arrival, often by international visitors planning a wider South Island route. We build operator sites with itinerary-friendly content, real wildlife and heritage photography, accessibility for an older visitor demographic, and direct-booking flows that win the booking from a visitor comparing across South Island routes.
Professional Services
Dunedin's law firms, accounting practices, financial advisers and consultancies serve a city whose client base ranges from university and hospital salary-earners through to heritage-wealth families and Otago-region rural sector. The expectation is sober, authoritative web presence with the depth to support B2B sector pages. We build firm sites that demonstrate authority before the first call — partner profiles that earn the meeting, sector pages that name the work, contact paths that don't waste the partner's time on tyre-kickers.
Doing business in Dunedin
Dunedin is structurally unlike the rest of New Zealand south of Wellington. Founded by Scottish and Free Church of Scotland settlers in 1848, Dunedin earned the name 'Edinburgh of the South' — a founding identity that still shapes its architecture, its institutional character and its design culture in ways no other New Zealand city can replicate. The University of Otago and its associated research institutes give the city roughly 22,000 students against a permanent population of around 135,000 — that ratio shapes everything from rental dynamics to hospitality trade patterns to the demographics of the consumer base. Dunedin Hospital is the major tertiary teaching hospital for the lower South Island, anchoring a large health sector. Heritage manufacturing and engineering remain an active part of the economy in a way they're no longer in Auckland or Wellington. And the city's heritage architecture stock — the densest concentration of Edwardian and Victorian commercial buildings in the country — has driven a distinctive design culture out of the Otago Polytechnic and Otago design programmes that punches well above the city's size.
That translates directly into web design demands you don't get elsewhere. The university audience consumes content on phones during semester and lives on laptops between — sites have to work for both equally. The hospital and healthcare audience skews older and the accessibility bar is non-negotiable. The manufacturing and B2B audience expects depth that retail-focused builds don't deliver. And the city's design culture means visual standards are higher than the size of the local market suggests — Dunedin clients have been to the Otago Museum, walked the Octagon and seen what good heritage-meets-modern looks like. They notice when a site doesn't measure up. We build every Dunedin site for that audience reality — mobile-first Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility as a default not an upsell, and visual integrity that holds against the city's design heritage. That's the bar this city actually competes at.
Dunedin SEO, done properly
Ranking for 'web design dunedin' or '[your service] dunedin' is not a fluke — it's the result of technical fundamentals most builds skip. Every Dunedin site we ship goes out with a clean .co.nz domain strategy, LocalBusiness schema markup pinned to your actual Dunedin address, Google Business Profile integration that synchronises hours and reviews, and structured data for the specific services you actually offer. For education, health, scientific and research clients we add Organisation, Event and Course schema where they apply — and accessibility metadata that has real ranking weight for the audiences these sectors serve.
Dunedin is several local search markets, not one. A 'cafe Roslyn' search and a 'cafe St Clair' search return different result sets, and 'physio Mosgiel' is not the same intent as 'physio dunedin central'. We architect for that — suburb-level pages where the volume justifies them, internal linking that signals which page owns which suburb, and review schema that surfaces star ratings in the SERP. For tourism and heritage operators we add TouristAttraction and Event schema so itinerary searches and 'things to do in Dunedin' queries surface your listing in the rich result, not just the ten blue links.
Mistakes Dunedin businesses make with their websites
Dunedin's university-anchored economy, its heritage design culture and a web design market that punches above regional New Zealand average produce a recognisable set of structural errors. Across the Dunedin landscape, from Octagon professional services to North Dunedin student-facing operators, health and medical clinics in the suburbs, tourism businesses on the Otago Peninsula and manufacturers across Mosgiel and Green Island, the same six failures recur across every category. None of them are aesthetic oversights. They are commercial decisions that cost enquiries and erode trust with an audience that knows what good design looks like.
Ignoring the student-calendar demand cycle
Roughly 22,000 University of Otago and Otago Polytechnic students shape Dunedin's hospitality, retail and service demand on an academic timetable most businesses outside the university don't consciously plan for. Orientation week in late February, mid-year break in June and July, and the November exam period each produce distinct search and spending patterns. Operators who run the same homepage message year-round miss the booking windows that concentrate when students arrive, and miss the local-resident trading opportunity that opens when they leave. Static sites serve neither intention properly.
Building health and allied health sites that fail basic accessibility
Dunedin Hospital and the surrounding cluster of specialist practices, allied health providers and medical-tech firms serve a patient base that skews older than the national average. Yet the majority of Dunedin health websites carry accessibility scores in the 40s and 50s on Lighthouse, with contrast ratios that fail WCAG 2.2 AA, font sizes that require pinch-zoom on a phone screen, and booking flows that break entirely for keyboard-only users. For any health, disability or aged-care provider in Dunedin, accessibility compliance is not a branding bonus. It is a legal exposure and a direct patient conversion failure.
Treating the Otago Peninsula as an afterthought in tourism SEO
The Royal Albatross Centre at Taiaroa Head, yellow-eyed penguin viewing, Larnach Castle, fur seal colonies and the wider Peninsula tourism circuit are some of the most distinctive wildlife and heritage experiences in New Zealand. Yet a significant proportion of Peninsula and Dunedin tourism operators have no structured data for their attractions, no TouristAttraction schema, no itinerary-depth content, and no explicit page targeting for the 'things to do Dunedin' and 'Otago Peninsula wildlife' queries that drive international visitor bookings weeks before arrival. The organic ranking gap this creates is the most avoidable in the city's tourism category.
B2B manufacturing and scientific firms hiding credentials in PDFs
Dunedin's manufacturing base, its university spinouts and its scientific services sector sell into B2B procurement pipelines where the website does the first stage of supplier qualification. If your ISO certifications, AS/NZS compliance records, capability statements and project case studies live in downloadable PDFs linked from a footer, procurement officers and research partners at the due-diligence stage move on. PDFs are not indexed at the same depth as web pages and are rarely opened at the research stage. Turning those credentials into structured web pages with real project specifics is the single highest-ROI content change for most Dunedin B2B firms.
Conflating 'Dunedin' with 'the whole Otago market' in page architecture
A business covering Dunedin CBD, Mosgiel, Green Island and Port Chalmers is not serving a single search market. 'Accountant Mosgiel', 'physio South Dunedin', 'cafe Roslyn' and 'engineering firm Dunedin' return different results in Google's local algorithm and carry different conversion intent. Businesses that build a single services page for Dunedin and dump all suburbs into one paragraph are leaving suburb-level queries unaddressed entirely. For any Dunedin business with a genuine geographic service area spanning more than the Octagon precinct, suburb-level page architecture is a ranking decision, not a design preference.
Heritage and hospitality sites that look Victorian in the wrong way
Dunedin trades on its Victorian and Edwardian architectural heritage, and the city's design culture, shaped by the Otago School of Design and a genuine creative sector, has produced an expectation of heritage-literate visual language that actually holds up. The failure is when heritage operators, accommodation providers and Octagon hospitality businesses try to signal heritage through ornate website styling: serif font stacks, textured background patterns, antiqued colour palettes and decorative borders that read as dated on a 2026 screen. Heritage credibility on the web is earned through restraint and photography quality, not through design that imitates the Victorian era it's celebrating.
What a Dunedin website actually costs
Dunedin's web design market sits between Queenstown's premium-visitor pricing and the standard regional New Zealand rate, shaped by a commercial base that includes both university-scale institutions and small sole-trader operators. The brackets below are fixed-price, NZD ex-GST, quoted after the brief. The number you sign for is the number the project finishes at. No hourly estimates, no provisional sums, no scope creep billed retrospectively. These brackets reflect the actual cost of hand-coded, purpose-built work at the standard the Dunedin market warrants, from the sole-trade allied health practitioner in Andersons Bay to the university-adjacent research institute in the CBD.
Foundation build
Custom design from the ground up, not a theme or a Squarespace clonable. Hand-coded in React and Next.js. Mobile-first responsive build with Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, LocalBusiness schema pinned to your Dunedin address, Google Business Profile integration, enquiry and contact forms with spam filtering, basic CMS for news or blog posts, WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility pass, and three rounds of design revision. The build quality here is identical to higher tiers. The page count and feature depth are smaller.
Mid build
Everything in foundation, plus suburb-level page architecture for Dunedin's distinct catchments (Mosgiel, South Dunedin, St Clair, Roslyn and North Dunedin are each separate local search markets), custom interaction and motion work, online booking integration with practice management or reservation systems, accessibility audit to WCAG 2.2 AA as a formal deliverable rather than a best-effort pass, TouristAttraction or ProfessionalService schema where applicable, team profile and practitioner pages with structured data, and a CMS your team can manage without a developer. Most Dunedin professional services and health briefs land in this bracket.
Premium build
Everything in mid, plus multi-audience content architecture serving prospective students or patients, procurement contacts and referring GPs or research partners simultaneously. Course or programme finder functionality for education clients. Capability and project case study architecture for manufacturing and scientific firms, structured so procurement due diligence is completable from the website without opening a PDF. Full custom CMS with editor roles and approval workflows. Accessibility certification to WCAG 2.2 AA with third-party audit documentation. A six-month content plan targeting the Dunedin-specific queries that compound into organic enquiry. Integration with enterprise systems where applicable.
Enterprise build
A programme across multiple stakeholder groups and content streams. Discovery with departmental, marketing, compliance and executive stakeholders. Governance workflows built into the CMS with role-based editorial permissions. Full content migration from legacy platforms with URL mapping and SEO preservation. Custom web application development where the brief requires it: student or patient portals, research publication libraries, supplier qualification tools, interactive product capability databases. Enterprise system integration at the API level. Full accessibility certification with ongoing quarterly reporting. Co-leadership with your internal team rather than a single-handover engagement.
The Dunedin web design landscape (honest read)
Dunedin's web design market is smaller than Christchurch and smaller again than Auckland, but it is not as thin as it looks from the outside. The city's design culture, the Otago School of Design's influence, and a commercial client base anchored on the university and hospital create genuine demand for quality work. The market rewards capability more consistently than most South Island centres outside Queenstown.
The top tier of the local market is held by a handful of Dunedin and Christchurch studios with established relationships across the university, health and professional services sectors. Their work is variable. Some are genuinely strong: technically capable, well-designed, with client portfolios that hold up against Auckland competition. Others built their reputation in the WordPress era and have maintained client relationships through account management rather than through raising their technical ceiling. Price points at this tier run $10k-$35k for a typical mid-size Dunedin brief, which is broadly consistent with Christchurch rates and moderately below equivalent Auckland scope pricing.
The mid-tier is where the Dunedin market shows its most visible gap between visual ambition and technical delivery. Several local freelancers and small studios produce genuinely thoughtful visual work, informed by Dunedin's design culture. The typography choices are considered. The colour work is restrained. And the Lighthouse mobile performance score sits in the 30s because no one has engineered the image pipeline, the CMS is WordPress with a premium theme and eight active plugins, and the booking integration is a third-party widget embedded in a page builder block. These sites look like craft work at first glance. They perform like template sites under any technical scrutiny.
The long tail of the Dunedin market is the dominant volume: Squarespace, Wix, and DIY or outsourced WordPress builds that account for the majority of the city's small business, hospitality, sole-trade and creative operator web presence. This category is not the result of Dunedin businesses not caring about quality. It is the result of the local agency market not making a convincing enough case for the return on doing it properly. The Dunedin commercial base includes enough well-run businesses with enough margin to invest in serious web work. The gap is the agency side, not the client side.
A trans-Tasman studio competes in Dunedin for reasons specific to this market. The design ceiling set by a Melbourne studio handling briefs across multiple Australian and New Zealand cities is genuinely above what the Dunedin local market has had to clear. Remote-first delivery removes the Dunedin studio overhead from the project budget. And in a city the size of Dunedin, where the professional services and university networks are tight and reputation travels fast, one well-executed visible build generates its own next brief.
Migrating Dunedin businesses off WordPress, Webflow or Squarespace
Platform migration is one of the most common briefs that come out of Dunedin's professional services and health sectors. Practices and firms that built their site on WordPress five or six years ago, watched performance decline as plugins accumulated, and now face an accessibility compliance gap that a plugin-heavy WordPress build cannot close without a full rebuild. University-adjacent research organisations on institutional WordPress installs that have outgrown the platform's CMS limitations. Hospitality and tourism operators on Squarespace who have hit the template ceiling and cannot build the itinerary-depth content or booking flow their visitor audience requires.
The first question on any migration brief is honest: does this need a rebuild, or a refresh? If the content is current, the pages rank, the URL structure is intact, and the primary problem is visual or a single broken feature, a refresh on the existing platform may be the right call. A rebuild is the right decision when the platform itself is the ceiling: when performance, design control, CMS flexibility, accessibility compliance or integration capability are constrained by the stack rather than by budget or effort. For most Dunedin WordPress installations that are five or more years old and carrying twelve or more active plugins, the platform is the ceiling.
SEO preservation is the core technical discipline of any Dunedin migration. Sites in the university, health and professional services categories often carry years of accumulated local authority for specific Dunedin queries. Losing that authority through a botched migration, through dropped 301 redirects, changed URL structures, orphaned canonical tags or an incomplete sitemap handover, can erase ranking positions that took years to build. Every migration starts with a full indexed URL audit before a line of code is written. Every URL is classified as keep, redirect or retire. A complete redirect map is built and tested before launch. Search Console receives a clean handover and crawl errors are monitored for thirty days post-launch.
The Dunedin-specific migration challenge is often the accessibility gap. Health, disability and education-sector sites that pre-date the 2023-2024 tightening of WCAG 2.2 guidance frequently fail the accessibility standard in ways that are structural rather than cosmetic. Remediating accessibility on a WordPress page-builder site is technically expensive and rarely complete. A migration to a clean hand-coded build is often faster and more definitively compliant than attempting to patch an existing installation.
Cost: a Dunedin migration from WordPress or Squarespace runs approximately 75-85 percent of an equivalent new build. A $16k Dunedin new build migrates for roughly $12k-$13.5k depending on content volume, integration complexity and the state of the source platform. Timeline is 5-8 weeks for most Dunedin migration briefs.
Dunedin SEO — the technical depth most local builds skip
The organic search results for most Dunedin commercial queries reveal a consistent pattern: national directories, Google Maps listings with variable completeness, and a small number of local businesses whose pages rank because no one else has done the technical work. That is the honest state of Dunedin's organic search across most service categories. The gap is large enough to be a genuine competitive advantage for any business willing to invest in the fundamentals.
Web design Dunedin is a search market where the competition is moderate, the searcher intent is commercial, and the technical quality of the existing ranking pages is, on average, low. The keyword variants that carry real intent, specifically website design Dunedin, web designer Dunedin, and web design services Dunedin, each return slightly different competitor sets and carry different user contexts. Someone searching web design Dunedin is typically in early comparison mode. Someone searching web designer Dunedin is often closer to a decision and looking for a person or team, not just a category. Someone searching website design Dunedin with a specific service qualifier attached is usually at the brief stage. Page architecture that treats all four variants as interchangeable, pointing to the same page with the same content, leaves intent-specific traffic unaddressed.
Catchment architecture is the largest structural SEO decision for Dunedin businesses. Mosgiel is a separate town with a distinct local search market for services from trades to professional services to health. South Dunedin, Andersons Bay and Port Chalmers each function as distinct suburban catchments. Roslyn and Maori Hill carry a professional residential profile with specific service demand. North Dunedin's student population creates a near-me intent cluster that is almost entirely separate from the Octagon commercial catchment. Building a single Dunedin services page and adding all suburbs to a footer paragraph is the most common structural mistake in local Dunedin SEO, and it is the most avoidable.
For Dunedin tourism and heritage operators, the structured data opportunity is significant and almost entirely unexploited. TouristAttraction schema for the Royal Albatross Centre, Larnach Castle, Toitū Otago Settlers Museum and Peninsula wildlife operators. Event schema for seasonal wildlife viewing windows, Dunedin Fringe, the Writers and Readers Festival and the Rhododendron Festival. LodgingBusiness schema for Dunedin accommodation providers with roomType, amenityFeature, checkInTime and priceRange populated. The rich result opportunity in Dunedin's tourism SERP is real, visible and almost entirely unclaimed.
Google Business Profile management is the most direct ranking lever for Dunedin businesses competing in the Map Pack. Dunedin's Map Pack in most service categories is competitive enough that an incomplete or inconsistently managed GBP is the difference between Pack visibility and a page-two result. Responding to every review, including two-star responses with specific acknowledgement, posting at least twice monthly, selecting the correct primary category rather than the nearest broad approximation, and populating the Q and A section with the actual pre-enquiry questions your clients ask: these are the GBP signals almost no Dunedin business has fully executed.
What 4 weeks versus 8 weeks looks like in Dunedin
A four-week Dunedin build is achievable. The difference between that ceiling and the eight-week median for a professional services or health brief is almost never build speed. It is content readiness, stakeholder count, compliance review cycles and the institutional decision-making pace of Dunedin's largest client categories.
Week one is brief, content audit and brand discovery. A sole-trade allied health practitioner in Mornington with existing photography, a clear service list and full decision-making authority can finish week one on Friday ready for design. A university-adjacent research organisation brief involving a department head, a communications officer, a research ethics consideration for any published content, and internal procurement approval for external spend is still in week one at day twelve. The Dunedin academic calendar introduces a specific timing variable: briefs initiated in late October run into the November exam period and the December-January university shutdown. Briefs kicked off in February run against orientation week complexity. We map the institutional calendar at brief signoff and build accordingly.
Weeks two and three are design. Wireframes mid-week two, high-fidelity by end of week three, two revision rounds built in. Dunedin hospitality, sole-trade and creative operator briefs move fastest through this phase: one decision-maker, a clear aesthetic context shaped by Dunedin's design culture, and no compliance layer. Health and university-adjacent briefs slow at design sign-off because the design has to clear accessibility review, brand guidelines and, in some cases, institutional communications approval before it can proceed. For research and education clients where the site carries publicly-attributed content, the sign-off cycle is the critical path, not the design quality.
Weeks four through six are the hand-coded build. React and Next.js, mobile-first, with a hard sub-2.5 second LCP constraint enforced from the first commit, WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility implemented at the component level rather than patched at the end, and CMS architecture built so content editors can make updates without touching code. This is the most predictable phase: build speed varies with scope and integration complexity.
Weeks seven and eight are content population, QA, accessibility audit, performance pass, 301 redirect mapping for migrations and launch. The Dunedin-specific factor in this phase is photography. Otago Peninsula wildlife photography, Octagon architectural heritage imagery, South Dunedin street-level context and Mosgiel industrial facility photography each require scheduling that accounts for Dunedin's famously unpredictable southern weather. We build the photography brief into the project plan at week one, not as a final-week addition.
What compresses Dunedin timelines: a founder-led professional services or hospitality business with existing brand assets, a clear decision-maker and no institutional review process. What stretches them: university and hospital-adjacent briefs with multi-stakeholder sign-off, compliance and ethics review, photography on the Otago Peninsula in uncertain weather, and migrations off large WordPress installations where the content audit reveals content that is years out of date and needs rewriting before it moves.
Dunedin-specific questions.
Do you only work with Dunedin businesses?
No — we work across Australia and New Zealand. Dunedin is one of our distinctive New Zealand markets because the city's commercial mix — university, health, science, heritage manufacturing — is unlike anywhere else south of Wellington, and the design expectations here are higher than the size of the city suggests. We've built up working knowledge of the Dunedin commercial geography (the Octagon, North Dunedin, St Clair, Mosgiel, Port Chalmers) and what Dunedin businesses expect from a site that holds up against the city's heritage and design standards.
Do you have a Dunedin office?
Our studio is in Melbourne — we don't maintain a Dunedin office, and we're upfront about that. Most Dunedin clients prefer it that way: we charge studio rates, not Octagon-rent rates, and the work is remote-first by default. Dunedin is two hours ahead of Melbourne, which means morning calls catch us before lunch and afternoon work comes back the same day. For projects that need on-site research, photography direction or workshops, we travel down and bill accordingly.
What does a Dunedin custom website actually cost?
Briefs start at $9,000 NZD for a 5-7 page custom site with the standard scope (brand discovery, content, three rounds of design revision, hand-coded build in React and Next.js, launch). Larger sites — 15+ pages, custom integrations with student management systems, practice management, hospital scheduling or manufacturing ERPs, e-commerce, custom CMS — sit in the $17k-$50k NZD range. Enterprise university and health builds run higher. We give you a fixed price after the brief, never an hourly estimate.
How fast can a Dunedin site be live?
Typical custom builds ship in 4-8 weeks from signed brief. The variance is content and decision speed — not our build speed. If you have brand assets, copy and a single decision-maker ready to go, a tight-scoped build can ship in three weeks. University, hospital-adjacent and research clients usually take the upper end of that range because of internal review cycles, compliance signoff and ethics-board content review where it applies. We map gating items on your side at brief signoff.
Will the site rank for 'web design dunedin' or my industry-specific Dunedin searches?
Ranking depends on factors we control (technical SEO, content depth, internal linking, schema, page speed, accessibility) and factors we don't (your domain age, backlink profile, competitor activity). What we commit to: every site we ship hits the technical fundamentals competitors get wrong, ranks on page one for your branded terms within 30 days of launch, and has the on-page work done to compete for the commercial queries that drive enquiry — 'physio Mosgiel', 'accountant Roslyn', '[your service] Dunedin'. For tourism and heritage operators, we also build for the mid-funnel itinerary queries that drive bookings days later.
Do you work with Dunedin startups, sole traders and small businesses on a budget?
Yes — Dunedin has a strong small-business and sole-trader base, especially in creative services, allied health, trades and food production. Our pricing floor is firm at $9k NZD because the work to ship a quality custom site genuinely costs that. We can scope down (fewer pages, simpler interactions, deferred features for a phase two) to hit that floor without compromising the build. What we don't do at any price is templates, page-builder drag-drop, or off-shore production.
Do you migrate Dunedin businesses off WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace or Wix?
Yes — platform migration is one of the most common briefs we scope in Dunedin. The trigger is usually one of three things: the site is slow, the site is broken after a plugin update, or the site can't pass an accessibility audit (especially for health and education clients where compliance is non-negotiable). Our process: full content audit, URL mapping for SEO preservation, hand-coded rebuild in React and Next.js, accessibility re-audit, staged launch with 301 redirects, and a follow-up performance pass two weeks post-launch.
Hand-coded across Australia and New Zealand.
We build for businesses in every major city across the trans-Tasman. Same hand-coded approach, tuned to each local market.
Let's build Dunedin's next great website.
Tell us about your project. We'll have a genuine conversation — no sales pressure, no jargon — and figure out if we're the right fit for your business. Briefs start at $9k NZD.