Skyward Digital
Skyward Digital Building your own website
For anybody weighing up doing it themselves Every figure here includes GST

Yes, you can build it yourself. The building was never the hard part.

Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and the rest are good software. Dragging a section into place, picking a typeface, getting a tidy page onto a real address — that was difficult fifteen years ago and it is close to solved now, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling. So this page does not argue that you cannot do it. It argues about where the work actually sits, because the part people run out of road on is never the assembling. It is deciding what the pages are for, writing sentences about your own business that a stranger will believe, getting a photograph that is not of a wall, making sure an enquiry lands somewhere a human reads it, and still having all of that be true in March. Four cases where doing it yourself is plainly the right call are first. Then the six jobs that exist whoever puts the pages together, and five questions that settle it for you rather than for us.

When to do it yourself Skip to the six jobs
Can you do it yourselfYes, and sometimes you should
What the platforms solvedThe building, nearly all of it
What is left overSix jobs, and the words are one
What we ask up frontNothing at all
01 / WHEN YES

Four times when
building it yourself
is the right answer,
and we would say so.

We would rather lose the job than take money off somebody who did not need to spend it, partly because that is the deal and partly because a business talked into the wrong thing tells people. If you are standing in one of these four, close the tab and go and do it. Nothing further down the page changes any of them.

Build it yourself

There is one thing to say and one place to say it

A single site, fixed hours, one service, and a customer whose entire question is where you are and whether you are open. A butcher, a dairy, a hall for hire, a club. The whole job is an address, a map, a number, the hours and three photographs, and every platform on earth will do that in an afternoon.

And before even that: most of the people asking that question never reach a website at all — they are looking at a map result. A Google Business Profile, done properly, answers more of it than a website does, and it is free to claim yourself.

Build it yourself

You are still finding out whether the business works

Six weeks in, two customers, a name you are not certain you are keeping. The honest position is that you do not know yet what the business is going to be, and nobody can write a good page about a business that has not settled. Put up something plain, get it in front of people, and spend the money on the work instead.

Why we would not take this job: we would be designing around guesses, and the site would need replacing the moment you learned anything. Come back when you can tell us what you keep getting asked on the phone — that single sentence is worth more than any brief.

Build it yourself

You like doing it, and you will keep doing it

Some people enjoy this. If you are one of them you have the thing no studio can sell you, which is somebody who will go back in next month and fix the hours, add the new service and swap the photographs. A tidy site that gets touched every few weeks beats a handsome one that froze in 2024, and it is not a close contest.

The test is not the build: it is whether you were still editing it in six months. If you have built one before and it is still current, you already know the answer. If you have built one before and it stopped in week three, that is also an answer.

Build it yourself

The work is sold on photographs you take anyway

A cake maker, a florist, a joiner, a mobile groomer — somebody whose proof is a stream of new pictures off their own phone. The value is in the posting rhythm, not the layout, and a platform you can update from the van in four minutes suits that better than a studio build you have to ring somebody about.

What to watch instead: that the pictures are not the only thing on it. A gallery with no prices, no service area and no obvious way to ask is the single most common quiet website there is, and it is the usual reason one gets no enquiries.

If none of those four was you, the question is not really whether the software is any good. It is who is going to do the six jobs in section 03, because those exist whoever drags the sections into place. Section 02 first, though, because the platforms deserve a fair hearing and we have no interest in giving them anything else.

02 / WHAT THEY ARE GOOD AT

Five things the
platforms do better
than we do, and
we are not sorry.

A studio that tells you the tools it competes with are rubbish is telling you something about itself rather than about the tools. These are good products, built by large teams over fifteen years, and each of them is better than us at something. Knowing which something is the useful part, because it is how you work out whether the thing you need is a builder, a profile or a studio.

Squarespace, Wix

Letting you change something at nine at night

This is the real advantage and it is a big one. You put the price up, you take the Tuesday closure off, you add the new service, and it is live in four minutes without emailing anybody or waiting until Monday. Our own answer to that is a care plan with same-week edits, which is a worse answer for somebody who wants to tinker. If editing it yourself whenever you feel like it matters more to you than anything else on this page, that points at a builder.

Shopify

Selling things, properly, including the dull parts

If you are taking payments for products, with stock counts, shipping rules, refunds, tax and an order history, use the software built for it. That is not a web design problem and it is not one anybody should be hand-building for a small business. We would say the same thing to you on the phone, and if you want a studio to make a Shopify shop look like you rather than like the template, that is a reasonable job to ask somebody for.

The free end of it

Getting a credible address up for nothing today

There is a free or near-free option in almost every platform, and for a business with no website at all, something plain and true today beats something considered in three months. One page with what you do, where, a number and a form is a real website. It is also a perfectly respectable place to stop. Worth checking before you build: a free plan usually puts the platform's own name in your address, so find out what the step up to your own domain costs while you are deciding, not afterwards.

A profile and a feed

Reaching people without a website existing at all

A Google Business Profile and one active social account will out-perform a quiet website for a lot of local trades, and we say so on the homepage. If your work comes from a map result and from people seeing what you posted last week, that is where the hour goes. The reason to add a website later is not fashion — it is that a profile cannot hold prices, a service list, an area boundary or an explanation, and eventually something has to.

WordPress

Doing almost anything, if somebody is looking after it

The most capable of the lot, and the one most often handed to a one-person business as a finished thing. It is software with parts, and parts need updating — which is fine when that is somebody's job and awkward when it quietly became nobody's. If you are being quoted a WordPress build, the question worth asking is not about the platform. It is who is updating it in a year, and what a monthly fee is actually made of.

One question to ask of any of them, and of us, before you commit a year to it: if you wanted to leave, what exactly would you be taking with you, and who holds the domain. We will not tell you what any particular platform's terms say today, because they change and we would be wrong by next winter. The five accounts a website is actually made of sets out the question in a form that keeps working, and the answer to it for us is written on that page too.

03 / THE SIX JOBS

Six jobs that exist
whoever drags the
sections into place.

Every one of these has to be done by somebody, on any platform, at any price, and not one of them is made easier or harder by which builder you pick. This is the actual comparison. Read the six, work out which ones you are going to do yourself and which ones you would be quietly hoping go away, and you will have your answer well before the end of the page.

Exists whoever builds it

Writing sentences a stranger will believe

Not copy, not blurb — the actual words. What you do, who for, what it costs, what happens when they ring, why you and not the other two. It is the hardest half of a website and it has nothing to do with software. A template arrives full of placeholder text about quality and reliability, and the moment you sit down to replace it you discover that writing two hundred words about your own business is a genuinely difficult evening.

Why it is the one that stalls: because it is the only job on the list that cannot be done badly and quickly. People get the layout finished on Saturday, leave the words for next weekend, and the site is still eighty per cent done the following autumn. If one thing on this page decides it for you, it should be this one.

Exists whoever builds it

Deciding what the pages are and what each one is for

A template hands you Home, About, Services, Gallery, Contact, and that set is a guess about a business that is not yours. The useful version is driven by what people actually arrive wanting: a page per service if you want to be found for each one, an area page if the first question is where you go, prices if the first question is how much.

What it costs when it is skipped: a site that reads as being about you rather than about the job, and a search engine with nothing specific to show for anything you do. Which pages a local business needs is written out in full, free, for either of us to use.

Exists whoever builds it

Getting photographs that are of the work

Most trades have hundreds of photographs on a phone and almost none of them are usable, because they were taken to show a customer a problem rather than to show a stranger a finished job. The fix is not a photographer. It is thirty seconds at the end of a job, in daylight, standing back far enough to see what the thing is.

What it costs when it is skipped: stock pictures of somebody else's hands, which readers now recognise instantly, or a site with no pictures at all pretending otherwise. An honest page with four of your own photographs beats a polished one with twelve of a stranger's.

Exists whoever builds it

Making an enquiry land somewhere a person reads it

Every platform gives you a form. What none of them gives you is the decision about where it goes, who answers it, how quickly, and what happens to the one that arrives at nine at night while you are under a sink. Half the forms on small-business sites deliver to an address nobody has opened since it was set up.

What it costs when it is skipped: the only website failure that costs you a customer who had already chosen you. Send yourself one through your own form, from your own phone, on a Sunday, and see what arrives where. It takes a minute and almost nobody does it.

Exists whoever builds it

Being findable, which is not the website's job

A new site does not appear in anything by being published, and a builder's marketing checklist is not a search strategy. The thing that moves a local business is the profile, the categories, the service areas, the hours, the review habit — almost none of which lives on the website at all.

What it costs when it is skipped: a site nobody sees, blamed on the site. We will not promise you a ranking and neither can anybody else, but the order the work goes in is written down, and the review routine costs nothing.

Exists whoever builds it

Keeping it true after the week you built it

Hours change, prices change, a service gets dropped, somebody leaves, a van gets a new number. A website is the only piece of your advertising that keeps being read for years after you stopped thinking about it, and the one with last year's price on it is doing you active harm rather than nothing.

What it costs when it is skipped: trust, in the one place you cannot see it going. This is also the job that decides the whole question, because it is the only one that never finishes. A person who will do this is better off on a builder. A person who knows they will not should be paying somebody, and should ask exactly what that monthly fee covers.

Notice what is not on that list: choosing a typeface, picking a colour, arranging a hero section. Those are the jobs the platforms made easy and the jobs people imagine a website consists of. The six above are the website. Whoever you decide should do them — you, us, your nephew, nobody — the decision is better made against this list than against a feature comparison.

04 / THE ORDER

If you are going to
do it, this is the
order it actually
goes in.

This is a giveaway and it is meant to be used. It is the same sequence we follow ourselves, minus the parts that are only relevant to somebody doing it for a living, and it is written for somebody who is going to spend their own evenings on it. The two things most self-builds get wrong are both about order: the words get left until last, and the platform gets chosen first and agonised over.

  1. Step 1

    Buy the address, in your own name, before anything else

    Twenty minutes and the cheapest thing on the list. Buy the domain yourself, from a registrar, on your own card, with your own email on the account — not through whoever builds the site and not bundled into a plan you might leave. It is the one asset here that is genuinely yours and the one people most often discover is in somebody else's name.

  2. Step 2

    Pick a platform in one sitting, and stop

    The least consequential decision in this list and the one that eats the most time. Any of the main ones will build the site you need. Give it an afternoon, pick on whichever editor felt less annoying for the first ten minutes, and get on with step 3. Weeks disappear here, comparing products that would all have been fine, and a site that was never built is worse than one built on your second choice.

  3. Step 3

    Write the page list on paper, before you open the editor

    What pages exist, and one sentence each on who arrives there and what they want. Five minutes, no software. If a page has no answer to that question it should not exist, and most templates arrive with two of them. Doing this before you start is what stops the site being an arrangement of sections in search of a purpose.

  4. Step 4

    Write the words next, in a plain document, with nothing styled

    This is the hard part and it belongs here, not at the end. In a plain document, because a text box inside a layout makes you fiddle with the look to avoid the sentence. Start with what you get asked on the phone all day and answer it the way you answer it out loud. If you are stuck, dictate it into your phone while driving and tidy it up later — talking is easier than writing and it comes out in your own voice.

  5. Step 5

    Go and take the photographs on purpose

    One deliberate half-hour beats three hundred accidental photographs. Finished jobs, daylight, stand back, hold the phone level, one of you or your van. You need about six and you do not need a camera. Do it before you build, so you are arranging the page around pictures you have rather than leaving a gap for pictures you intend to get.

  6. Step 6

    Build it, then test the form from somebody else's phone

    Now the assembling, which is the quick bit, and the first thing to prove when it is up. Send an enquiry from a phone that is not yours, on data rather than your own wi-fi, and watch where it lands. Check it on a phone at arm's length in daylight. Then ask one person who is not in your trade to find your number without you saying anything.

  7. Step 7

    Claim the Google profile and put a reminder in your phone

    The profile does more of the finding than the site does, and it is free to claim. Then set a repeating reminder — the first of the month, ten minutes — to check the hours, the prices and that the form still delivers. That reminder is the difference between a website and a website that used to be true.

  8. How it ends

    The site that is permanently eighty per cent done

    This is the outcome worth planning against, and it has nothing to do with the platform. The layout got finished in a weekend, three pages still say the template's words, the gallery is empty, and it has sat in a browser tab for eleven months because the next job is the hard one. It is nobody's fault and it is extremely common. The fix is not more hours — it is to publish what is actually true today, with three pages instead of seven, and delete the rest. A small honest site that exists beats a considered one that does not, by a distance. If you are in this now, that is the move, and it takes an evening.

Do not start with the template

Choosing a design first means writing to fit somebody else's idea of what you have to say. Steps 3 and 4 before you open the editor is the whole trick, and it is free.

One page is a real answer

There is no minimum. One page with what you do, where you work, what it costs and how to reach you is a website, and it is better than five pages that are three-quarters placeholder.

The free plan and your address

Find out what your own domain costs on the plan you are picking before you build on it, not after. It is usually modest and it is always more annoying to sort out later.

Use this list on us, too

If you do end up hiring somebody, these seven still happen — ask who is doing step 4 and when they need your half. It prevents more delay than anything else you could ask.

05 / FIVE QUESTIONS

Five questions, and
you will know which
way to go without
asking anybody.

Answer these to yourself rather than to us. Three of them point at building it yourself and we have written them that way on purpose, because a page that ran five questions and arrived at our own door five times would be worth nothing to you. If you want to use them as a checklist and then ring somebody else entirely, that is a perfectly good outcome of reading this.

Question 1

Who is writing the words, and on which evenings?

The only question that really matters. Name the person and name the nights. If the honest answer is you, this week, and you have done something like it before, build it yourself. If the honest answer is a vague intention to get to it, you are not choosing between a platform and a studio — you are choosing between a site that exists and one that does not, and paying somebody is a way of buying a deadline with another person's name on it.

Question 2

What is an hour of your own time worth, and how many are spare?

Not a trick question and not an argument for spending. Put a number on your own hour — what you charge, or what you would pay somebody to cover a shift — and count the evenings you actually have. Some trades have winter. Some have a quiet fortnight in January. If you are turning work away at the moment, your hours are the most expensive thing in this comparison; if you are not, they are the cheapest.

Question 3

Is a stranger choosing between you and two others on it?

There is a real difference between a site that confirms you exist and a site doing comparison work. A customer who already has your name needs an address and a number. Somebody holding three quotes is reading for reasons to eliminate two of them, and that page has to carry prices, scope, process and proof in a particular order. The first is a weekend. The second is a job.

Question 4

What happens to it in March?

Picture the first of March with the site live. Who changes the hours over Easter, adds the service you picked up in February, replaces the photograph of the van you sold. If that person is you and you can see yourself doing it, that is a strong argument for a builder you can edit in four minutes. If you cannot picture it at all, work out what being looked after would cost before you choose, rather than afterwards.

Question 5

If it were half-finished in June, would you publish it anyway?

Say yes to this and you can safely build it yourself, because the worst realistic outcome — a small plain site that is true — is a perfectly good one. Say no, and know yourself well enough to believe it, and the half-built version in a tab is the likely ending. That is the one case where paying somebody is not buying design. It is buying the fact that it gets finished.

Three or more answers pointing at yourself: go and do it, and take section 04 with you. If it was the other way round, the next section is what we do and what it costs, and you can read it knowing we have just spent five sections arguing the other side.

06 / OURS

So build yours, and
we will build ours.
Then look at the
two of them.

This is the only sensible way to end an argument like this one, and it is how we work anyway. We build your real homepage first — written about your actual work, live at an address we send you — and you pay nothing until you have seen it. There is no deposit, nothing to cancel and no obligation at the end. If you have already built something yourself, put them side by side on your own phone. If ours is not obviously worth the money, do not spend it; you will still have yours, and you will have lost nothing but a conversation.

Step one · about twenty minutes

A conversation, and then we go away

On the phone or at a job. What you do, where, what you want more of, what you are sick of being asked, and what you have got already — a logo, photographs, a profile, a site you built yourself. None of it is required. If you have a half-finished build somewhere, send us the address; it tells us more about what you want than any brief would.

Step two · usually a few days

We write it and build it, at full standard

Real sentences about your work rather than placeholder text, the photographs you have or none if you have not, and an enquiry form that actually delivers. The same standard you would be paying for, because a demo built to a lower one would be telling you something false about what you would get. No money has moved and none is going to until you have looked.

Step three · yours to sit with

Open it next to yours, on your own phone

That is the comparison this whole page has been circling, and it is the only one worth anything. Read both as a stranger would — which one says what you do in the first line, which one you could find a number on in four seconds, which one you would ring. Text them both to somebody whose opinion you trust and do not stand over them explaining.

Step four · only if you want it

Then, and only then, a price

If you want the site we quote the tier that fits and take a deposit against a named set of pages and a date. If you do not, you owe nothing and we do not keep ringing. And if what you actually need is the $395 profile and the build-it-yourself route, we will say so on the call rather than after the invoice — that happens, and this page is what it looks like when it does.

Seeing your homepage

The conversation, the build and the address, with nothing owed if the answer is no and no sequence of emails afterwards. It is the only arrangement that settles a self-build comparison honestly, because you get to look at the thing instead of reading a studio's opinion of itself.

$0and nothing owed if the answer is no

A website, if you want it

Three tiers. Essential at $2,450 for up to four pages, Standard at $3,450 for up to eight with a page for each service, and Lead Engine at $5,950 with service and suburb pages, a local search campaign, the missed-enquiry assistant for a year and three months of care. The homepage you already looked at is the first page of whichever one you pick, and the founding price takes $500 off any of the three.

$2,450to $5,950, three tiers

Google Business Profile setup

The smaller door, and frequently the right one to go through first — especially if you are building the site yourself. Claimed, verified and in your name, with the categories, service areas, hours, photographs and review link all done properly, in a day. You keep it whether or not you ever build a site with us.

$395one-off, no website needed

Care plan

Optional on every tier, and the answer to question 4 if the honest answer there was that nobody is touching it in March. Hosting, domain and certificates on one bill, unlimited small edits inside 48 hours, a monthly look at the profile, backups and updates checked rather than assumed. Saying no to it changes nothing about what you own.

$169per month, or $1,690 a year — two months free

Every figure on this page includes GST and nothing is added at the end. You own the site, the domain and the content, and you hold every login from the first day rather than the last — there is no lock-in, no exit fee and nothing to pay to leave, which is the same standard section 02 says you should hold a platform to. The founding price takes $500 off any website, for the first ten clients, in exchange for three things written into the job: an honest Google review once the work is done, a testimonial we can use, and permission to publish the build as a case study. It is a trade rather than a discount, and we do not discount off-menu. Full pricing, tier by tier.

07 / STRAIGHT UP

Four awkward
questions about
a page like this.

Is this not just an elaborate argument for hiring you? Partly, obviously. We sell websites and this page sits on our site, and anybody reading it should hold that in mind the whole way down. What we would say in our defence is that four of the five questions in section 05 can be answered in a way that sends you off to build it yourself, section 04 is the actual sequence rather than a teaser version of it, and section 02 says out loud that five products we compete with are better than us at something. A page written purely to win the argument would have none of that in it. The judgement to make is whether the six jobs in section 03 are real, because everything else follows from them, and you can check that against your own experience rather than against us.

If the platforms are that good, what is left for a studio to do? The six jobs, and the fact that they get finished. The honest division of labour is that the software made the assembling trivial and did nothing at all about the thinking or the writing, which is where almost all the value in a website was always sitting. What we are selling is a decision about what the pages are, sentences written by somebody who has done it before, a form that is proven to deliver, and a date. If somebody offers you a cheap site and the thing they are cheap at is the assembling, you are being quoted for the part that stopped being hard.

Why would you publish the method instead of charging for it? Because we cannot see the downside, and because the alternative is worse. A business that follows section 04 and builds a decent site itself was never going to pay us; a business that reads it and realises how many evenings it is has learned something true about its own situation. Both are better outcomes than somebody hiring us under a misunderstanding and resenting it in month three. Everything on this site works the same way — the costs page, the ownership page, the care page — and the rule we hold ourselves to is that each page has to be worth reading to somebody who never contacts us.

And the part we cannot dress up. Skyward is new and has no clients yet, so nothing above is a story about the hundred self-builds we have rescued. There are no testimonials on this site because there are none to print, and the builds in the portfolio are invented businesses, labelled as such on every page of them. The free homepage is not a technique we settled on after years of trying things — it is the only argument a studio with no track record has got, which is exactly why you can rely on us to keep offering it. The first ten clients also get $500 off for helping with the not-having-any problem, in exchange for a review, a testimonial and permission to publish the build.

08 / QUESTIONS

Six from people
who have already
had a go.

I built one myself. Can you take it over rather than start again?

Send us the address and we will tell you honestly which of the two it is. Sometimes the structure is sound and what it needs is the words and the enquiry path done properly, which is a smaller job than a build. Sometimes the quickest honest route is a new one, and we would rather say that on the phone than find it out in week two. Either way you will get an answer before there is a quote.

What we will not do is quote a rescue as a build because it is worth more. If an evening of your own time fixes most of it, that is what we will tell you to do.

Will you actually tell me to build it myself if that is the answer?

Yes, and it costs us nothing to do it. A business that is six weeks old, or whose customers only need an address and a number, or whose owner plainly enjoys tinkering, is not a job we want — it goes wrong for everybody. In most of those cases the thing we would point at is the $395 profile rather than a website at all, and that is a sale we are happy to make instead.

The one thing we would ask is that you take section 04 with you. It is the sequence, it is free, and it is the part that decides whether yours gets finished.

I have just paid for a year on a builder. Is that money wasted?

No, and do not let anybody use it as a reason to spend more today. Run the year out. Use the time to do steps 3, 4 and 5 — the page list, the words and the photographs — because every one of those is yours and carries across to anything you do afterwards. Then decide in eleven months with the hard half already done, which is a much better position than deciding now.

If you want us to look at it in the meantime, that is a conversation rather than a quote, and there is nothing to pay for it.

If you build it, can I still edit it myself?

Yes, within reason, and it is worth being precise about what that means. Text, prices, hours, photographs and new pages are all editable, and we will show you how on a call and leave you written notes. What you would not be doing yourself is rebuilding the layout, because these are hand-built sites rather than a drag-and-drop editor — that is the trade, and it is the reason they are fast and do not carry a platform's weight.

If editing everything yourself whenever you like is the thing you care about most, section 02 is honest about where that points, and it is not at us.

Do I need a website at all, or will the Google profile do?

For a decent number of local businesses the profile does most of the work, and close to half of New Zealand businesses have no website at all. Whether that is costing you anything depends entirely on where your work actually comes from, which is a question with a real answer rather than a matter of opinion. The page on whether you need one works through it, including the outcome where you do not.

If you are not sure, start with the profile. It is cheaper, it is quicker, and it tells you something about how people are finding you before you spend anything larger.

If I build with you, what happens when I want to move it?

You take it. The domain is in your name from the first day, you hold every login, the content is yours, and there is no exit fee and nothing to pay to leave. The files are ordinary web pages, so any developer can host them anywhere — there is no platform to be let out of, which is the part of this that is genuinely different from renting a site.

Ask the same question of anybody, including a builder, before you commit a year to them. The five accounts a site is made of sets out exactly what to ask for and in whose name each one should sit.

ALSO WRITTEN

Three places to
go from here.

One if you are building it yourself and the words are the thing stopping you, one if the question underneath this one is really the number, and one if you have not actually settled whether you need a website at all.

If it is the words

What to put on it, page by page.

Job 01 in section 03, done properly and for nothing. Which pages a local business actually needs, the eight things that belong on every one of them, and the nine worth deleting tonight. Written to be used by somebody building it themselves.

 If it is the number

What a website costs, and what moves it.

Two honest quotes can be four thousand dollars apart without either being wrong. What each price band actually buys, the decisions that move the number, and eight questions that make two quotes comparable — this studio included.

 If you are not sure yet

Whether you need one at all.

Close to half of New Zealand businesses have none, and whether that is costing you anything depends on where your work actually comes from. A way to find out before you spend, including the answer that you do not need one.
09 / ASK

Tell us what you do.
We will build the
homepage and send
you the address.

No deposit, no obligation and nothing to cancel. A conversation of about twenty minutes, then a few days, then a link you open on your own phone and put next to whatever you have built yourself. If the answer is no you owe nothing and you will not be chased. And if you would rather just be told whether to do it yourself, ask us that — we will answer it straight, and the answer is sometimes yes.

Phone or text022 584 0585 Emailjosh@skywarddigital.co.nz The smaller doorGoogle profile setup, $395

Josh reads these himself. There is no salesperson, no sequence of emails afterwards, and asking a question does not put you on a list.

We use these details only to reply to your enquiry and, if you go ahead, to run the job. We don't sell them, we don't add you to a mailing list, and you can ask us to delete them any time by emailing Josh. No spam, no obligation, no sales sequence. The full privacy statement says who else handles them and for how long.