questions, answered.

The things people ask before signing on — and a few they should. Drop us an email if yours isn’t here.

How much does a small business website cost in New Zealand?

Most small NZ businesses pay between $1,500 and $15,000 depending on who's building it. DIY platforms (Wix, Squarespace) run $20–$50/month and you do the work yourself. A freelancer charges $2,000–$8,000 one-off. A bigger agency runs $10,000–$50,000+. Price alone isn't a great quality signal — the honest middle for a properly-built custom site is around $1,500–$3,000. For context: Presence charges $1,495 one-off, GST inclusive, for a 10-page custom build.

Why are some websites so cheap and others so expensive?

The price difference is rarely about quality of code or design, it's about how many people you're paying and their overheads. A solo developer with no office spends nothing on overhead and can charge $1,500 for a site that an agency with account managers, project managers, designers, devs, and a city office charges $15,000 for. Both can produce excellent work. The expensive end is mostly hands and ceremony, not better code or design. The cheap end is fine if the person you're hiring has actually shipped sites before — ask to see five they've done.

What ongoing costs should I expect after a website is built?

Three recurring costs, regardless of who built it: domain renewal (~$50/year for .co.nz), hosting (free–$30/month for a small-business site), and email (free–$10/month if you want an @yourbusiness.co.nz email). Optional add-ons: maintenance plan ($30–$300/month if you don't want to handle updates yourself), Instagram or social management ($65–$2,000/month depending on who and what), paid SEO services ($300–$2,000/month). GEO is a new thing (AI-based optimisation) so is a little more expensive. For context, Presence has largely automated social management and charges a $350 set up fee then $65/m for up to 50 automated/scheduled posts including design.

What's the difference between a Wix site and a custom-built website?

Wix (and Squarespace, GoDaddy, Shopify's builder) is a template you fill in — fast to set up, hard to look different, hard to move elsewhere. A custom-built site is written from scratch, lives on hosting you control, looks like your business not someone else's, and is significantly faster, which matters because Google ranks fast sites higher in local search. The trade-off: custom typically takes weeks to months to build and costs more up-front. Worth it if you care about ranking on Google, looking distinct, owning what you've paid for, and flexibility. For reference Presence turns around websites in about a week.

Is Wix or Squarespace good enough for a small business?

For some, yes — if your customers come from word-of-mouth and you don't care about Google rankings or looking different from the other businesses on the same platform. For most, no — Wix sites load slowly (Google penalises this), look templated, and lock you into the Wix ecosystem (try to move and you'll find you can only export your text, not the design). The honest answer: if your business depends on people finding you on Google and you have a brand you want to protect and share, custom is worth the difference.

How long should it take to build a small business website?

A custom small-business website should take 1 to 4 weeks from brief to launch. Big agencies often quote 3 to 6 months — most of that is internal review cycles and meetings, not actual building. The build itself is 2 to 4 days of design and code. The rest is your feedback rounds. Anything over a month for a 10-page site is usually process bloat. Presence does one week, two clients at a time, no overlap.

What does the design phase of a website project look like?

For most small-business sites the design phase is shorter than people expect. It usually goes: Brief — you fill out a form about your business, customers, what you do, what you'd like the site to feel like. Brand check — colours, fonts, logo set, voice. Wireframes or first draft — a designer sketches the page structure. Visual design — the actual look. Revisions — usually two rounds. Sign-off — you approve, Presence launches. The whole design phase should take 3–7 days for a small-business site. Big agencies stretch it to 2–4 weeks with "discovery workshops" and "concept exploration" that mostly produce slide decks.

How many revisions should I expect during the design phase?

Two structured rounds is the sweet spot for a small-business site. The first round catches direction issues ("the headline doesn't sound like us"); the second catches polish ("can the button be a touch darker?"). More than three rounds usually means the brief wasn't clear enough at the start — easier to fix that than to keep iterating. Endless revisions ("revision purgatory") is what happens when the designer doesn't push back on contradictory feedback and the project drags for months.

What's the difference between a logo, a wordmark, and a brand identity?

A logo is the small mark you put in the corner of things — often square or circular, designed to be recognisable at tiny sizes. A wordmark is your business name in a specific typeface — like the FedEx or Coca-Cola lettering. A brand identity is the whole package: logo + wordmark + colours + fonts + voice + the rules for how they fit together. A small business needs all three eventually, but starts with a wordmark and one main colour — you can build the rest as you grow. Spending $10,000 on a "brand identity package" before you've got customers is putting the cart before the horse. Presence can include a brand identity PDF for free with website builds.

Do you own your website when someone else builds it for you?

Depends on the contract. Read it before you sign. With DIY platforms (Wix, Squarespace), you don't own the site — try to move it off and you'll find you can only export your content as text, not the design or features. With some agencies, the code and design files live on their side and you license the result. With others (Presence included), you own the domain, the code repository, your content, and the admin login. If the contract doesn't say "you own everything", assume you don't. Walk away or get it in writing.

Who handles the website after launch — me or the designer?

Two common patterns. Self-service: you have full admin access and the developer hands you the keys at launch. You're on your own for day-to-day changes, and pay hourly if something breaks. Maintenance plan: the developer keeps a monthly retainer, handles updates, fixes things when they break, and does small changes for you. Most small businesses prefer maintenance plans for the first year and then move to self-service once they've found their rhythm. Plans typically run $50–$100/month for a small-business site starting at 30 mins per month of time to use (Presence charges $39 and includes 60 mins per month and free simple tweaks).

Will I be able to edit my own website after it's built?

Yes, if it's built with a CMS (content management system). You log into an admin panel, edit text or prices or photos in plain-English forms, save, and the live site updates within a few seconds. No code, no developer needed for day-to-day changes. Ask any designer/agency you're considering whether they'll set you up with a CMS or whether you'll need to email them for every small change. The right answer is the first one. (Presence's sites include an admin area to edit most things.)

Can I build my own small business website with AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, v0, Lovable, or Bolt?

You can build a homepage that looks great in an afternoon — AI is genuinely excellent at HTML, CSS, and visual layouts. Whether you can ship and run a working business website is a different question. The visual layer is the easy 10%. The other 90% is infrastructure: a contact form that delivers emails to your inbox (needs an email service, SPF/DKIM/DMARC records, spam protection, NZ Privacy Act 2020 compliance for storing submissions); editing your content later (needs a content management system with a login, a database, automated backups); the site staying online next year (paid hosting, monitoring, security patches, domain renewal, SSL certificate renewal); ranking on Google (sitemap, structured data, page speed under 2 seconds, mobile-friendly across hundreds of device sizes); legal pages that hold up (the default AI privacy policy isn't NZ Privacy Act compliant). Each one is its own service, its own monthly cost, its own breakable point. For most small businesses, "build it with AI" produces a great-looking homepage that doesn't do the unglamorous work a real business website has to do. Presence handles all of this for you.

How do you automate social media for a small business?

Most "automation" for small-business socials is one of three things: Scheduling tools (Buffer, Later, Meta Business Suite) that let you write a week of posts on Monday and have them publish through the week. Content templates — a small set of post layouts you reuse so each new post is words + photo on a known template, not designed from scratch. Batch creation — sitting down once a month to draft, design, and queue 12 posts in two hours rather than agonising daily. Presence handles all three, and puts a human at the centre of that loop rather than letting AI handle everything.

How often should a small business post on Instagram?

Three times a week is the sweet spot for most small NZ businesses. More than that and quality drops (you run out of things to say); less than that and you fade from people's feeds. Time of day matters less than consistency — pick a posting time, stick to it, and your audience learns when to expect you. The other thing: post variety beats post quantity. A mix of work-in-progress, finished jobs, and the occasional human moment outperforms three "look at our finished job" posts in a row. Presence designs and schedules this for you so you just review some text once a month and watch your page grow.

Is it worth paying someone to manage your Instagram?

Worth it if Instagram currently or could drive 10%+ of your leads, or you've genuinely tried for three months and can't stick to a rhythm. Not worth it if you're posting once a week and it's working — keep going. The pricing landscape for small NZ businesses: DIY is free but you'll spend 3–6 hours+ a week. A virtual assistant runs $20–$50/hour but is off-shore and not secure for sharing sensitive info with. A local social media agency runs $500–$2,000/month. A small studio doing both website + social is usually $50–$100/month bundled with the site. For reference Presence offers social management for $65 a month and you can sit down with Alex (he's a human) in Kāpiti to design it.

Should I get my website and Instagram done by the same person?

Worth doing if the brand should look consistent across both. Most small businesses end up with a mismatched site and Instagram because they hired different people at different times — different colours, different photo style, different voice in the captions. Doing both at once is cheaper, faster, and keeps the brand tight. The downside: if you don't like the social side later, switching is awkward. So pick someone whose work you like across the board.

Is it better to host my website in New Zealand or overseas?

For a small NZ business, it usually doesn't matter where the server is — what matters is where your visitors are. Modern hosting (Vercel, Cloudflare, AWS) uses global "edge networks" — your site is served from the nearest data centre to each visitor, automatically. For NZ visitors, the closest edge is usually Sydney (~30ms away — imperceptibly fast). What matters more: the hosting must support HTTPS, scale during traffic spikes, and have a paid plan you can actually afford long-term.

How important is fast page loading for a small business website?

Critical, for two reasons. First, Google ranks fast sites higher in local search — slow ones get pushed down the results page. Second, around half of mobile visitors bounce if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load. Wix and Squarespace sites typically load in 5–10 seconds; well-built custom sites load in under 2. The speed difference compounds into fewer leads every month, forever.

What's the difference between local SEO and regular SEO?

Regular SEO is what gets you to rank for searches like "plumber". Local SEO is what gets you to rank for "plumber in Wellington" or "plumber near me". For small NZ businesses, local SEO is what actually drives leads — almost every customer is searching with location intent. The wins for local SEO: a Google Business Profile (free), location pages on your site with real address + service area + phone, structured data (LocalBusiness schema), and reviews. Paid SEO services often skip these basics in favour of bigger-ticket items.

What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and do I need it for my small business?

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization — it's the newer cousin of SEO, aimed at AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google's AI Overviews (the AI-written summary that now appears at the top of many Google searches). Where SEO is about ranking blue links, GEO is about getting your content quoted directly inside an AI's answer. The wins are different: AI engines lift content from sites that publish clear factual answers in natural-language Q&A form, mark them up with structured data (especially FAQPage and LocalBusiness JSON-LD), keep pages fast and crawlable, and write in a consistent factual voice the AI can quote without rewording. If a customer asks ChatGPT "who builds small business websites in Kāpiti?" — GEO is what decides whether your business gets named in the answer. It's worth doing now because AI search is growing fast and most small NZ businesses haven't caught up yet, so the door is wide open. Presence builds GEO in from day one on every site — FAQ pages with FAQPage schema, LocalBusiness markup, fast page loads, natural-language content the AI can lift cleanly. The page you're reading right now is a working example.

Do you write the copy?

Yes — Presence does. You fill out a short brief about your business, customers, and voice; Presence turns that into the words on the page. You review and approve before launch. Bring your own copy if you'd rather — Presence will lay it out as written.

Do I need to provide photos?

Helpful but not required. If you don't have them, Presence will suggest stock or type-led layouts that don't need photos at all. The best small-business sites usually have a mix of one or two strong human photos + clean type for the rest.

Can you migrate from my current site?

Yes. Send Presence the URL in your brief. Presence will preserve what works (testimonials, contact info, anything ranking on Google) and rebuild the rest.