Wellington's hand-coding web studio.
Pryce Digital builds custom-coded, high-performance websites for Wellington businesses. We work with clients from the CBD and Te Aro to Thorndon, Kelburn to Lower Hutt — and we don't ship templates. Every site is hand-coded in React and Next.js, built for the government-grade and tech-fluent audience Wellington trades in.
Published by Pryce Digital · Hand-coded from Melbourne · Serving Wellington, Wellington
A studio that actually understands Wellington.
Serving all of Wellington.
We work with businesses across greater Wellington — from government and policy work clustered around Thorndon and the CBD, to tech and creative agencies in Te Aro and along Cuba Street, hospitality from Mount Victoria through to Island Bay, professional services in Lower Hutt, and growth-stage retail and trades across the Hutt Valley, Porirua and the Kapiti Coast. Whichever side of the harbour you're on, the same hand-coded approach 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 Wellington businesses
Wellington's economy concentrates a handful of industries at unusually high density for its population — government, tech, film and creative production. The web design needs in each are sharper than the New Zealand average — accessibility compliance is non-negotiable, technical literacy in the audience is high, and brand standards are set by Wētā and Xero-grade output. Here's how we approach each.
Government & Public Sector
Wellington is the seat of New Zealand government — most ministries, crown entities, and policy bodies headquarter here. Public-sector web work demands WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility as a baseline, not a nice-to-have, plus careful handling of te reo Maori, plain-language content and procurement-grade documentation. We build hand-coded sites that meet the NZ Government Web Accessibility Standard out of the gate, with audit trails the procurement team can sign off without revision.
Tech & SaaS
Wellington's tech cluster — anchored by Xero, Trade Me, Sharesies and a long tail of B2B SaaS — means marketing sites compete on technical credibility. The buyer has read your changelog before they hit your landing page. We build hand-coded marketing sites that match the engineering culture of the audience — fast Core Web Vitals, clean documentation patterns, no template smell and no marketing-team WordPress drift over time.
Creative & Film Production
Wellington's creative sector is unusually deep for its size — Wētā FX, Wētā Workshop, Park Road Post, and a network of post-production, animation and games studios. Their clients expect portfolio sites that hold up next to Hollywood-grade work. We build creative sites that lead with full-bleed work, treat case studies as the primary content, and don't strangle the work in template chrome.
Hospitality & Lifestyle
Wellington hospitality — Cuba Street bars, Hannahs Laneway eateries, the Lyall Bay coffee scene — competes on brand identity at a level disproportionate to the city's size. Wellington diners read menus on phones in the rain queueing outside. We build hospitality sites with full menus that render fast on 4G, booking integrations that actually convert, and identity that survives the mobile screen.
Professional Services
Law, accounting and policy advisory cluster around Lambton Quay and Featherston Street — much of it servicing government, crown entities and the public-sector pipeline. The audience expects authority signalling that template sites can't deliver, plus the discretion the work demands. We build firm sites that demonstrate authority before the first call and don't over-share the client list.
Tourism & Events
Te Papa, the Wellington Cable Car, the wineries of the Wairarapa, the cultural festivals that fill Civic Square — Wellington's visitor economy runs on a mix of domestic and international traffic. Operators competing with Booking.com, Viator and GetYourGuide need direct-booking sites that earn the guest before the commission applies. We build the booking flow first and design around it.
Doing business in Wellington
Wellington is geographically compact and commercially dense in a way no other New Zealand city matches. The CBD walks end-to-end in twenty minutes. That density means your competitors are physically next door — a law firm on Featherston Street is two doors down from three others, the SaaS company on Wakefield Street shares a stairwell with two more, and the hospitality strip on Cuba Street stacks bars and eateries every fifty metres. The buying audience moves between them on foot, in weather, judging brands from phones held inside coat pockets.
The Wellington consumer is technically literate at an above-average rate — Xero, Trade Me, Sharesies and the public service have trained a generation in expecting clean digital experiences. The bar for what passes as 'a decent website' is higher than the New Zealand mean. Template sites read as suburban — fine for Hamilton or Tauranga, conspicuously out of place on Lambton Quay. We build for that expectation. Every Wellington site we ship targets a mobile-first Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, meets WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility scores in the 90s, and maintains visual integrity at the price point Wellington expects. Add to that the weather constraint — Wellington's wind and rain mean mobile use is dominant even more than the national norm — and the case for a fast, accessible, hand-coded site stops being a luxury and starts being baseline competence. That's the bar Wellington businesses are competing at — and the bar template sites consistently fail to clear.
Wellington SEO, done properly
Ranking for 'web design wellington' or 'best [your industry] wellington' is not a fluke — it's the result of technical fundamentals most builds skip. We ship every Wellington site with a clean .co.nz domain strategy, LocalBusiness schema markup pinned to your actual Wellington address, Google Business Profile integration that synchronises hours and reviews, and structured data for the services you actually offer. For government-adjacent businesses we add the schema attributes that procurement teams scan for, plus the bilingual te reo Maori metadata where it applies.
Suburb-level targeting matters in Wellington — a 'plumber Karori' search shouldn't hit the same page as 'plumber Lower Hutt', and a 'cafe Te Aro' search shouldn't share a page with 'cafe Petone'. We build site architectures that respect those distinctions. Google's algorithm treats the Wellington region as several distinct local search markets — the CBD core, Te Aro, the eastern suburbs, the Hutt Valley, Porirua and the Kapiti Coast all behave differently in 'near me' results. Building one 'we cover Wellington' page and hoping is the most common SEO mistake we see in this region.
Mistakes we see Wellington businesses make
Wellington's web design problems aren't the same as Auckland's. A capital-city economy concentrates around government procurement, a tech cluster trained by Xero and Trade Me, and a hospitality strip that lives or dies on phones held in wind and rain. The mistakes that cost Wellington businesses the most aren't generic SEO oversights — they're failures to read the specific bar this city sets. Six we see repeatedly, and what they actually cost.
Skipping te reo Maori in metadata when government procurement requires it
Most Wellington agencies treat te reo Maori as an optional polish at the end of a build. For any business chasing government, crown entity or council contracts, that's a procurement-stage fail. Tender responses now routinely score bilingual content, language tags (`lang="mi"`), and Maori-language metadata as part of the cultural-competency weighting. We've seen Wellington firms lose $40k-$200k contracts because their site couldn't pass a 10-minute Te Aka Maori dictionary spot-check. Build it in from day one, not as a retrofit.
Treating WCAG 2.1 AA as a stretch goal instead of the floor
The NZ Government Web Accessibility Standard mandates WCAG 2.1 AA for any public-sector facing site, and the private sector audience that buys from those firms expects the same baseline. Most Wellington builds we audit pass automated checkers (axe, Lighthouse) but fail real assistive-tech testing — keyboard traps, missing skip links, contrast failures on hover states, form errors announced wrong. Procurement teams test the live site, not your accessibility statement. Fail the test, lose the contract — and there's no second chance in the same financial year.
Designing for Lambton Quay when half your buyers are in the Hutt
Wellington agencies often design as if the whole audience walks past your shopfront on Lambton Quay between 7.30 and 9am. The actual buying audience is split — Lambton Quay professionals, Te Aro creatives, Lower Hutt and Petone trades, Porirua family services, Kapiti Coast retirees. The mobile context, network speed and design literacy varies wildly across that range. One CBD-flavoured site fails three of the five audiences. Suburb-level page architecture and a mobile-first build that hits 2.5s LCP on 4G is the fix.
Optimising for tourists when your domestic audience drives revenue
Wellington's visitor economy looks loud — Te Papa, the Cable Car, Wairarapa wineries — but for most operators, domestic Wellingtonians and inter-island Kiwis spend the year-round dollar. We see tourism and hospitality sites built for the international visitor who books through Booking.com anyway, while the regular weekday lunch crowd from the surrounding office blocks gets a slow, image-heavy site that won't load on a 4G phone in Civic Square. Build the booking flow for the people who pay rent here first.
Trusting a public-sector-only agency with your private-sector launch
Wellington has a cluster of agencies that built their reputation on government work — and it shows in everything they ship. Procurement-grade design is risk-averse, documentation-heavy, and visually conservative by necessity. Apply that template to a private-sector SaaS marketing site or a hospitality launch and the site reads as a 2014 council portal. The reverse is also a trap: don't hand a government accessibility brief to an agency that's only ever built D2C ecommerce. Match the agency's portfolio to your actual sector.
Ignoring the wind-and-rain mobile context
Wellington's weather isn't a footnote — it's a UX constraint. The southerly hits, the rain comes sideways, and your audience reads your menu on a phone held inside a coat pocket while queuing under an awning on Cuba Street. Sites that need precise tap targets, hover states, or multi-step booking flows fall apart in that context. We design every Wellington hospitality and retail site for one-thumb operation, glove-friendly tap targets, and copy that scans without zoom. Most builds don't, and conversions die quietly.
What a Wellington website actually costs
Wellington pricing sits roughly 10-15% above the Auckland mean for the same scope — partly because the capital's accessibility, te reo and procurement-grade documentation overhead is real, partly because the local talent pool is small and Wakefield Street rates reflect it. The tiers below are what we charge for hand-coded React/Next.js work delivered remotely from Melbourne, including travel to Wellington for stakeholder workshops where the brief warrants it. Government and crown-entity work typically sits one tier above the commercial equivalent because of audit, te reo and plain-language overhead.
Foundation build
Custom design (not a template), hand-coded React/Next.js build, three rounds of design revisions, mobile-first responsive across the full Wellington device mix, basic LocalBusiness schema, Google Business Profile setup, .co.nz domain configuration, contact form with spam handling, and a launch performance and accessibility pass. WCAG 2.1 AA baseline included — not an extra. Suited to commercial sites where the buyer reads three pages and books.
Mid-tier build
Everything in Foundation plus deeper suburb-level page architecture (Te Aro/Thorndon/Lower Hutt variants), industry-specific schema (LegalService, ProfessionalService, FoodEstablishment), custom CMS for blog and case studies, booking or enquiry flow integration, te reo Maori metadata and language tagging where relevant, and a structured-data pass tuned for the queries your industry actually competes on. This is where most of our Wellington private-sector work lands.
Premium build
Full WCAG 2.1 AA audit and assistive-tech testing (not just automated checks), te reo Maori bilingual content layer with proper lang tags and Maori macron handling, NZ Government Web Accessibility Standard documentation package, custom CMS with editorial workflow, integrations (CRM, booking, payments, identity), staged QA across browser and assistive-tech matrices, and a launch plus 60-day post-launch optimisation window. Includes one in-Wellington stakeholder workshop trip billed transparently.
Enterprise build
Multi-stakeholder discovery across procurement, legal, accessibility and editorial teams; full design system documentation; custom backend or headless CMS architecture; multi-language te reo Maori and English content modelling; SOC 2 / ISO-aligned development practices; full audit trail for procurement and security review; multiple in-Wellington workshop trips; phased launch with structured handover to in-house teams. Quoted fixed-price after a paid two-week discovery phase.
The Wellington web design landscape (honest read)
Wellington's agency market is small, concentrated, and bifurcated in a way Auckland's isn't. The capital supports maybe two dozen agencies of meaningful size, most clustered in a four-block radius around Cuba Street, Wakefield Street and Te Aro. Roughly half of them built their book on government and crown-entity work — and it shows in their portfolio, which trends towards risk-averse, documentation-heavy, visually conservative output. The other half chases private-sector SaaS, hospitality and professional services, with portfolios that look sharper but often skip the accessibility and bilingual content groundwork the public-sector houses do reflexively.
There are four broad tiers visible in the market. At the bottom, freelancers and one-person studios shipping WordPress and Webflow at $4k-$10k NZD — fine for solo professionals, structurally unable to scale to procurement-grade work. The mid-tier sits at $15k-$40k NZD with established 5-15 person studios doing competent commercial work; this tier is crowded and the output is often interchangeable. The upper-mid at $40k-$120k NZD is where the established government-adjacent agencies live — strong on accessibility, strong on documentation, often weak on visual ambition. Above that, the handful of senior strategic shops do $150k+ NZD work that's genuinely strong but slow and bureaucratic to engage.
The gap we see is in the $20k-$60k NZD range for businesses that need both the visual ambition of the private-sector studios AND the accessibility, te reo and procurement-readiness of the government houses. Wellington firms shouldn't have to choose between a sharp-looking site that fails WCAG and an accessible site that looks like it was built in 2016. The combined skill set is rare locally — most agencies optimise for one audience.
A Melbourne studio competes well here remotely because the overhead structure is different. We're not paying Wakefield Street rents, we're not staffed to win government tenders we then sub-contract, and we travel to Wellington when the brief warrants it rather than maintaining a permanent presence we have to feed. Two-hour time difference, same business culture for the most part, and a portfolio that combines hand-coded technical depth with accessibility-first practice. For Wellington private-sector firms that want public-sector-grade fundamentals without the procurement-agency aesthetic, the maths works.
Migrating to custom from WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace or Wix
About a third of our Wellington work is platform migration. The mix locally skews towards WordPress (most common — legacy 2014-2019 builds with eight years of plugin rot), Webflow (popular with Te Aro creative studios from 2020 onwards, increasingly expensive at the scale Wellington tech companies hit), Squarespace (boutique hospitality and consulting that's outgrown the template ceiling) and a long tail of Wix and Shopify-as-marketing-site. The decision to migrate usually arrives one of two ways: either the site is fundamentally broken (slow, insecure, unmaintainable) or the business has outgrown the platform's design ceiling.
The diagnostic question we run with every Wellington migration brief is 'refresh or rebuild?' A refresh — repointing DNS, updating copy, swapping out a colour palette and a hero — costs $3k-$8k NZD and buys you 12-18 months. A rebuild is a custom hand-coded replacement at the cost tiers above. The honest answer for most Wellington firms with a 4-7 year old WordPress build is rebuild: the technical debt, the security exposure, the template lock-in and the SEO performance ceiling all compound, and another refresh papers over structural problems.
SEO preservation is the migration step most agencies under-invest in. Our standard migration playbook: full URL inventory and crawl of the live site, mapping of every indexed URL to its new equivalent, 301 redirect chain documented and tested before launch, sitemap regenerated and re-submitted via Search Console, structured data audited and re-implemented (most legacy sites have schema bugs they don't know about), and a 30-day post-launch crawl-comparison pass to catch ranking drops. For .co.nz domains the Search Console handover requires careful property-verification — easy to mess up if you've never done a NZ-domain migration before.
Timeline expectation for a Wellington migration of a typical 15-25 page WordPress site is 7-10 weeks including content audit and SEO mapping — longer if the source CMS is a tangle of custom fields and shortcodes that need disentangling. Cost ballpark sits in the $18k-$40k NZD range for that scope. Cheaper than starting over from a strategic standpoint, more expensive than 'just port the pages across' — because the migration step itself is where you preserve the rankings the business spent five years earning.
Wellington SEO — the technical detail most builds skip
The base SEO section covers the headlines. This is the operational detail. Wellington SEO sits on top of New Zealand's national search behaviour, which Google treats distinctly from Australia — .co.nz domains are favoured for NZ-located searchers in a way .com domains aren't, and a .com domain serving Wellington customers will consistently underperform an equivalent .co.nz domain in local queries. We default Wellington clients to .co.nz with the .com pointing redirected, not the reverse. Google Search Console properties need to be set up for both, and the international targeting field needs to be set to New Zealand explicitly — easy step missed by Australian agencies servicing NZ clients remotely.
LocalBusiness and ProfessionalService schema implementation in Wellington needs the address pinned to the actual physical location, not a virtual office. Crown-entity-adjacent firms benefit from Organization schema with sameAs links to LinkedIn, NZBN registry pages, and where relevant the procurement registry profile — these signals help disambiguate firms with similar names. For hospitality, FoodEstablishment with a servesCuisine array tuned to the actual menu, hasMenu pointing to a structured menu page, and acceptsReservations populated. For legal, LegalService with the areaServed set to the actual practice region (often greater Wellington, sometimes nationwide).
Suburb-level architecture is where Wellington diverges from a single-CBD city like Adelaide. A 'plumber Karori' page and a 'plumber Lower Hutt' page should not be the same URL with a parameter — they should be distinct pages with locally relevant content, separate schema with the suburb-specific service area, and internal links from a parent /services/plumbing page. The trade-off is content debt: don't build 14 suburb pages you can't keep current. Three to five strong suburb pages beat fourteen thin ones.
'Near me' intent versus explicit-city intent splits the query mix. 'Cafe near me' triggered from a phone in Te Aro hits the Google Business Profile pack first; 'best cafe Wellington' hits the organic results. Win both: GBP must be claimed, verified, populated with hours, photos and a steady review cadence; the organic page needs depth, internal links and the schema above. We integrate GBP review snippets into the on-site review block — most Wellington sites don't, and the trust signal cost of that omission is real.
Internal linking from blog and industry pages back to the city page closes the loop. Every Wellington-relevant blog post links once to the Wellington services page, every industry page links to the relevant suburb landing, and the city page links out to industries and suburbs in a hub-and-spoke pattern Google reads cleanly.
What 4 weeks vs 8 weeks looks like in Wellington
Wellington commercial builds typically run 4-8 weeks from signed brief; government and crown-entity work runs 8-14. The difference isn't our build speed — the React/Next.js codebase ships in the same time regardless. The difference is review cycles, accessibility audit overhead, and te reo Maori content sign-off.
Week 1 is brief, content audit and brand discovery. For a Wellington commercial client this is one workshop (often remote, sometimes a Wellington trip if the brief is complex), a content audit of the existing site, and a review of brand assets. For government work this stretches to two weeks because of stakeholder mapping — policy, comms, legal and accessibility teams each need a seat at the table, and getting four calendars aligned in the public service costs days.
Week 2-3 is design — wireframes first, then high-fidelity comps. We ship two rounds of revisions standard, three for premium tiers. Wellington private-sector clients usually move through this in eight to ten working days if the decision-maker is a founder or marketing director with sign-off authority. Public-sector reviews stretch this to three or four weeks because each round goes through the comms team, then legal, then sometimes a ministerial-office sign-off if the work is policy-adjacent.
Week 4-6 is the hand-coded build. React, Next.js, Tailwind, accessibility baked in from the first commit, schema layered in as the page templates land. We stage on a private preview URL the client can review continuously rather than a single big reveal at the end.
Week 7-8 is content load, QA, accessibility testing (real assistive tech, not just automated checkers), performance pass and launch. For government work we add a week for procurement documentation, the WCAG 2.1 AA audit report, and the te reo Maori content review.
What compresses Wellington timelines: a single decisive founder or marketing lead with sign-off authority, content ready before week 1, brand guidelines locked. What stretches them: multi-stakeholder review (especially across public and private sector partnership work), te reo Maori content that needs Maori-language expert review, accessibility audits that surface remediation work, and December-January when half the country is at the beach. Plan around the holiday window — Wellington shuts down harder than Auckland between mid-December and late January.
Wellington-specific questions.
Do you only work with Wellington businesses?
No — we work across Australia and New Zealand. Wellington sits as one of our priority NZ markets alongside Auckland and Christchurch. We have working knowledge of Wellington's commercial districts, the public-sector procurement cycle, the tech cluster's design expectations, and the suburb-by-suburb differences from Thorndon to the Kapiti Coast. If you're a Wellington business, we're not learning the market on your dime.
Do you have a Wellington office?
Our studio is in Melbourne — we don't maintain a Wellington office, and we're upfront about that. Most Wellington clients prefer it that way: we charge studio rates, not Lambton Quay rates, and the work is remote-first by default with the same NZST/NZDT working hours give-or-take two hours. For projects that need on-site research, workshops or stakeholder interviews — common on government work — we travel to Wellington and bill the trip transparently.
What does a Wellington custom website actually cost?
Briefs start at $9,000 NZD for a 5-7 page custom site with the standard scope (brand, content, three rounds of design revisions, hand-coded build, launch). Government and accessibility-compliant builds typically sit a tier higher because of the documentation and audit overhead. Larger sites — 15+ pages, custom integrations, e-commerce, multi-language te reo Maori support, custom CMS — sit in the $18k-$45k NZD range. Enterprise builds run higher. We give a fixed price after the brief, never an hourly estimate.
How fast can a Wellington site be live?
Typical custom builds ship in 4-8 weeks from signed brief. Government and public-sector work runs longer because of accessibility audits, plain-language passes and procurement sign-off — budget 8-12 weeks for those. The variance is content, accessibility review and decision speed, not our build speed. If you have brand assets ready and a single decision-maker, we've shipped Wellington commercial sites in three weeks. If we're waiting on copy, photography or stakeholder review, that timeline stretches.
Will the site rank for 'web design wellington' or my industry-specific Wellington searches?
Ranking for a specific query depends on a stack of factors we control (technical SEO, content depth, internal linking, schema markup, site speed) and factors we don't (your domain age, backlink profile, competitor activity). What we guarantee: every site we ship hits the technical SEO fundamentals competitors get wrong, ranks on page 1 for your branded terms within 30 days of launch, and has the on-page work done to compete for the local commercial queries you care about — including the suburb-qualified variants Wellington searchers actually use.
Do you handle WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility for government work?
Yes — accessibility-first is how every site we ship is built, but we step it up for public-sector clients. We hit WCAG 2.1 AA out of the gate, including keyboard navigation, screen-reader semantics, colour-contrast audits, and the te reo Maori language markup where it applies. We provide the audit documentation procurement teams need, and we test on assistive tech rather than relying on automated checkers alone. The NZ Government Web Accessibility Standard is a baseline, not a stretch goal.
Do you migrate existing Wellington businesses off WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace or Wix?
Yes — about a third of our Wellington work is platform migration. We've migrated firms off WordPress (slow, plugin-rotted), Webflow (expensive at the scale Wellington tech companies hit), Squarespace (template ceiling), and Wix (everything). The process: full content audit, URL mapping for SEO preservation across .co.nz, hand-coded rebuild in React/Next.js, staged launch with 301 redirects, and a follow-up performance and accessibility 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 Wellington'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.