Three routes get a website built. A freelancer suits a smaller site with a clear brief and one decision maker. A web design agency in Melbourne suits a full build, where design, code, words and search work all run at once. An in-house hire suits a business whose site changes every week.
What separates them is not the quote. It is who is still holding the site in year two. That is when the price list moves, the contact form stops sending, and nobody remembers why the booking page was built that way.
You are probably a small business owner, or the person who looks after marketing. You have a freelancer’s quote and an agency’s quote, and they describe the same job in different language. The third option, hiring someone, never gets a quote at all. There is a fourth route as well, which is building it yourself on a website builder. That is a different decision, about whether to pay anyone.
A freelance web designer is one person selling their own time. Some bring in a second pair of hands for design or code. The work still sits with them, and so does the responsibility.
You deal with the person doing the work. Nothing is lost between the meeting and the task list, because nobody sits in between. A change can be agreed on Tuesday and be live on Wednesday.
You pay for less. There is no account manager, no sales team, and no margin on work sent out to somebody else. On a small site that saving is real money.
A good freelancer also says no. One person can only carry so much, so you get a straight answer about what your budget will buy.
Then there is the part that is never in the quote. A freelancer is a single point of failure. Illness, a bigger client, a full-time job offer, a move interstate, and the work stops. There is no cover. There is usually nothing written down for the next person either.
A web design agency is a group of people, with one of them as your contact. You are buying capacity and a spread of skills, not one person’s week.
Somebody covers the work when your contact is away. Deadlines do not pause for annual leave or a resignation. Cover is the clearest thing an agency sells that one person cannot.
Different jobs go to different people, so more than one strand runs at a time. Design, code, words and search work can land in the same fortnight instead of queueing.
There is a written process, and someone whose job is to pick up the phone. That matters in the messy middle of a build, when the photography is late and the launch date is not moving.
The overhead is not always worth paying for. A five-page site for a business with one main service, briefed clearly, does not need a project manager between you and the designer.
Agencies fail in their own ways, and it is worth knowing how. You meet a senior person at the pitch and never see them again. A junior inherits your account and learns on your site. Your change request waits behind three bigger clients, because their invoices are larger. Ask who does the monthly work, by name, and ask before you sign.
Building it in-house means employing someone to do the work. That is a salary, on-costs such as superannuation and leave, and a desk. It is not a project fee, and it does not stop at launch.
The honest threshold is the volume of website work, not the size of the business. If the site is your main sales channel and changes weekly, a person inside the business beats any supplier for speed. By the end of the year they usually cost less as well. They are also in the room when the decision gets made.
The common version of this hire is where it goes wrong. A marketing coordinator is taken on for social media and the newsletter. They are then expected to be a designer and a developer too. One hire rarely covers design, build and content at once, so the site gets whatever is left of their week.
There is a second risk worth naming. When that person leaves, everything they know about the site goes with them, and often the logins go too.
Year two is where the three routes separate. Ask three questions of whoever you are considering, because the build is the short part of the relationship.
Who makes the change when the price list moves? With a freelancer it is the same person, if they still have room for you. With an agency it is whoever holds the support arrangement, sometimes called a retainer, which is an agreed amount of work each month. In-house, it is the person at the desk, which is the fastest of the three.
Who fixes it on a Friday evening when the contact form stops sending? That is a question about cover, not skill. One person cannot cover themselves. An agency covers the hours you agreed. A staff member covers the site only while they work for you.
Who remembers why it was built that way? This is the question that costs money later. When somebody takes over a site nobody documented, the usual answer is to rebuild it. A rebuild done without redirects can lose the search visibility the old pages earned. A redirect is the instruction that sends an old web address to the new one.
Missing logins and hosting details lead to the same rebuild, and the site has a longer piece on inheriting a website nobody documented. Year two has a running cost as well as an owner. If that is the part you are stuck on, start with what a website costs after launch.
Money is where everyone starts, so deal with it first. A freelancer and an agency both quote a project price, and the difference is what sits behind it. An in-house hire is a salary, paid in the months when there is no website work at all. For the numbers, the site sets out why Melbourne web design quotes range so widely, and which kind of supplier sits in each band.
Here is where each route usually lands.
Melbourne’s freelance and agency markets overlap heavily, and the same person can appear in both. They might subcontract to an agency one month and quote you direct the next. That is one reason two quotes for one job read so differently. It is worth ten seconds of checking before you assume you are comparing like with like.
The shape of your trade moves the answer as well. A shopfront on a strip like Smith Street needs a different site from a business selling across the city. The second one usually needs more hands on it.
If you trade in Fitzroy, there is a suburb-level version of this comparison on the site, written for small businesses there.
Before you choose, write down who will make the third change to the site after launch. Put a name to it, not a company. If nobody can be named, that answer has already chosen your route for you.
Settle two things in writing with whoever you pick: that the site is yours, and that you can move it without asking permission. CJ Digital’s web design page says both in writing. A business that cannot leave has no way to hold a supplier to their work. Then work out what to get clear on about your business before you brief a web designer. You will get better quotes from all three routes.
That depends on what was written down. If the logins, the hosting details and the reasons behind the build sit somewhere you control, the next person picks it up in a day. If they do not, expect to pay for a rebuild you had not planned.
Rarely. Design and code are two different trades, and writing is a third. A single hire usually covers one of them well and the others at a stretch. Be clear which one you are employing.
Line them up on who does the work, who covers that person when they are away, and what happens after launch. Price alone will not tell you. The two quotes are pricing different amounts of risk.
Nobody, unless you have named them. A build ends, and a support arrangement either exists or it does not. Agree the second year while you are still agreeing the first.
