Websites are like houses, but the land hasn't been cleared yet.
By Emma Coochin — 2026-09-24
By Emma Coochin. First published in the Clermont Telegraph, September 2026.
Websites are hard work to strategise and build. When it comes to websites and wondering if your business needs one, I completely understand the daunting wave of questions. I've worked on hundreds of websites in every business sector, and all of them have been their own adventure. Has your brain space already filled with anxiety, and inevitably put the new website project in the 'too hard basket'? You're in good company. A GoDaddy survey of Australian small businesses found 59% don't have a website at all, rising to 65% in regional areas like ours, and the most common reason owners gave was that their business felt too small to need one.
I'm on your side when it comes to asking web developers (the people who build websites) questions, because like you, I know all too well how asking an industry professional questions can make you feel out of your depth. And just like a good tradesperson, they will be happy to walk you through the process and be upfront about what lies ahead. The truth is, while web developers are the tradies of the digital world, their job is just one part of building a website. Consider the steps it takes to build a house. You don't need official government-sanctioned approvals before building a website. There are, however, steps on either side of the slab going down: market research, planning, design, build, and marketing. Here's the list to work through before, during and after your site launches. The first stretch of it costs very little, and you’ll thank your future self for starting sooner rather than later.
Before: the plans and the paperwork
1. Grab your names first
Business name, domain, and the matching social handles. Register them the day you're serious, even if launch is a year away. A .com.au domain runs about $35 a year. Imagine if you lost the name to someone else while you’re planning, and then you have to pay to rebrand.
2. Brand before build
Logo, colours, and brand voice, aka how you talk to customers. Sort these before the website starts, because a site built on a brand always beats a site with a brand bolted on afterwards. Stanford's web credibility research found 75% of people judge a business's credibility on its website design alone. They're judging the render, not the framing. If your branding budget is tight, at least write down what you sound like and stick to it.
3. Start the email list now
You don't need a website to collect email addresses, and on launch day, those people are your opening crowd. Most email platforms have a free tier to start on; MailerLite covers your first 250 subscribers.
It's worth the effort: email marketing returns an average of $36 for every $1 spent, according to Litmus, which makes that list the hardest-working asset your business will own.
4. Decide who's writing the words
Every page needs them, and they take longer to write than anyone expects. Writing them yourself saves money and costs evenings. Paying someone does the reverse. And yes, AI will draft them for free in a minute or two. Just know the internet has already coined a name for someone who passes on a machine's words without reading or editing them: a meat proxy. Don't be your own website's meat proxy. AI takes the human out of the words, so if it writes your first draft, make sure you write the last one. Deciding late on your copywriting approach is what stalls builds.
Side note: it’s worth asking if your developer includes a professional copywriting service. A copywriter will take your brand voice and turn your business into words that your customers will easily identify with.
5. Plan the photos
Good photography does more for a website than any feature you can pay for. Decide what you'll shoot, keep the lighting and colour tones consistent, and work out how new photos will keep coming after launch, not just for it. Make yourself a moodboard before you start; Pinterest is a great way to do this, and you can add this to your brand guidelines. A phone camera and consistent light beat an expensive one-off shoot that never gets a sequel.
Side note: Take your brand and ideas to a photographer for a quote. Or invest in simple photography gear like a lightbox, tripod, and lights to create more consistent imagery as you need it.
6. Sort the boring pages
A privacy policy at minimum. Shipping and returns if you sell. And check that your trading hours, phone number and address match what Google already says about you. Customers read these pages far more than you'd think, usually right before deciding whether to trust you.
7. Don't launch with everything
Write a wish list of features, rank it, and build from the top. A site that launches with the essentials this year beats the full-featured one that launches eventually. You can add features to a live website. You can't add customers to one that isn't up yet. Sometimes it helps to reference other sites you like. Because a good developer will understand how to replicate a feature that makes your site uniquely yours.
Side note: Don’t forget to collect testimonials from loyal customers along the way.
8. Ask who owns what
The domain should be registered in your business name, not your developer's, ever. Ask who owns the code and what happens if you ever want to move providers. A good developer answers that in one sentence. A long pause tells you plenty.
9. Count the full cost
The build price is the headline, but a website also comes with rent: hosting, domain renewal, business email. Small numbers that arrive every month, so put them in the budget on day one.
10. Write down where your day goes
The tasks you repeat every week, like retyping listings, chasing bookings or sending the same reply, are exactly what a quality website build can automate. Walk into a web developer meeting with that list, and you'll come out with a website that hands you hours back, not just a shopfront.
During: while the tradie's on the tools
This is the part nobody warns you about, and it's the part where I can feel you starting to skim. Don't. Stick with me. Halfway through a house build isn't knock-off time. The plumbing's going in, and if nobody checks where the pipes run, you find out at the housewarming that there’s no water to the kitchen. Websites are the same. Once the build starts, the developer does the developer's job. Everything else still needs doing, and it belongs to you or to whoever's running the project alongside you.
11. The build has more trades than the builder
On paper, the job is 'build a website'. In practice, here's what happens around the code: market research to work out what your audience actually wants, a strategy to marry that with what you want, the site's structure and where every piece of content lives, the design, a content interview to pull the answers out of your head, copywriting and the approval rounds that follow, chasing the photos, testing everything, setting up the analytics and email service, and training you to drive the thing. The developer builds the house. Someone still has to be the architect, the stylist and the removalist.
12. The site moves at the speed of your content
Every build I've ever worked on has been slowed down by the same thing: content and imagery. I'm working on a site right now that should have launched months ago. The build is ready. The photos aren't, because nobody had counted how long pulling them together would take. So start early, then hand it all over the way a builder wants materials delivered: sorted, labelled and on site before they're needed. Set up one shared folder. Inside it, make a folder for every page of the site, named after that page, and drop in each page's words, pictures and anything that page needs to do. Add one more folder marked admin, holding your logo files, brand colours and the site structure notes. Everything lands where you imagined it, and ten minutes of folders saves weeks of "where does this go?" emails.
13. Test it like a customer
Before launch, use the site the way a stranger would, on your phone, because that's where 59% of web traffic now lives. Tap the buttons. Fill in the forms. Buy something. Then hand it to a mate who's never seen it, watch where they get stuck, and say nothing while it happens. Building a site is one thing. Using it like a customer is completely unpredictable.
After: you've got the keys
Launch day feels like the finish line. It's actually the day you get the keys.
14. Launch is a marketing event, not a finish line
Announce it like one. This is the day the email list from step three earns its keep, because those subscribers are your opening crowd, primed and waiting. Tell them first, then tell everyone else, and keep telling people. A website nobody knows about is an empty shed, not a shopfront.
15. Watch what visitors do, not what you hope they do
Google Analytics is free and should come wired into any decent site build, and a busy owner only needs to check two numbers a month. First, where your visitors came from, e.g. Google, Facebook, email, a shared link. That tells you which of your marketing is working, so you can feed the channel that feeds you. Second, how many people did the thing the site is for: filled in the form, tapped the phone number, placed the order. Traffic is vanity. Action is the money shot. And listen to feedback as well as the data, because they catch different things. On our own website, people told us we were hard to contact even though 'contact' sat in the main header menu. We added a 'book a yarn' button next to it, and it's now the most clicked button on the site. The numbers alone would never have told us that.
16. A website needs housekeeping
Just like a house, it needs cleaning and updates to keep it fresh and inviting for your visitors, also known as your customers. Once a month, give it fifteen minutes: check that your trading hours, prices, and contact details are still accurate, add one fresh thing, glance at your two analytics numbers, and fill out your own contact form to make sure it still works. Once a quarter, read your homepage out loud and swap any photo that's gone stale. Once a year, go through every page, ask whether it still earns its place, and pick the next feature off your wish list based on what the feedback and data told you. And ask who's handling backups, software updates and security patches, because someone has to be, and it shouldn't be you. That same GoDaddy survey found 70% of Australian small businesses with a website report problems with it, and the biggest one is the time it takes to fix out-of-date information. The monthly once-over is the whole cure.
Most of the before list costs nothing. The during part mostly costs patience. The after part costs fifteen minutes a month. None of it needs a developer, which is exactly why it's worth sorting before you call one. Walk in with the plans, and the internet tradie can do what tradies do best: build.