A website for your shed
New Zealand sheds run themselves, and they run on people showing up. A shed website has one job: tell someone when you're open, where the door is, and that a new face is welcome. This page is our honest offer to the people who keep a shed going. A proper website, built for you, for a one-off price, owned by the shed outright, with nothing monthly behind it, ever.
Last updated July 2026
The front doorFacebook is the noticeboard. The website is the front door.
Most sheds run on a Facebook page and word of mouth, and for the blokes already coming, that works. The trouble is who it doesn't reach. Very often the person doing the looking isn't the man who'll walk through your door: it's his wife, his daughter, a mate, a GP or a social worker with somewhere in mind to point him. They search. What they need to find is a place, a set of hours, and a line saying new faces are welcome. A login wall gives them none of that.
Same for the man who's just retired, or moved to town, or lost his wife, and is having a look one evening before he decides whether he'd be intruding. And same again for the school that wants a repair job done, or the kindy after a planter box. A website holds those answers still, where Google and the newer AI search tools can find them and anyone can read them in a minute. It reads properly to a funder too: a grants committee looking you up finds a front door, not a feed.
And the honest other side: if your benches are full, you've got a waiting list and your page is humming, you may not need a website at all. We'd rather say that here than waste your morning.
What a shed website actually needs
Not much, done well. Your open hours, plainly, because every shed's are different: some run mornings, some a couple of days a week, some Saturdays too. Whether to just turn up or ring first, answered in a sentence. Where the door actually is, which is not always where the address says. What it costs to join and what a first morning looks like. What you take on for the community, whether that's fixing toys, building for a school or a kindy, or patching up bikes, and a plain way for someone to ask. A bit about the shed itself, because it's a workshop and a community before it's a list of machines. And a real person to contact.
What it doesn't need: a members login, a monthly platform plan, or anything the next committee will be scared to touch. We build small, fast, plain sites on purpose. They cost nothing to keep online, which is why hosting is free, and they keep working whether or not anyone logs into anything. If you're listed on the MENZSHED New Zealand map, the site sits alongside that, not instead of it, and we'll link out to it.
The changeover problem, solved by ownership
Nearly every shed has a version of this story. The page or the site was set up by one member who knew computers. He's since moved on, or moved south, or he's not well. The login went with him, the billing was on his card, and now nobody can change the opening hours or answer the school that emailed. That isn't a technology failure, it's an ownership failure.
Ours is built the other way round. The domain is registered in the shed's name, never ours. Hosting is free, so there's no subscription to lapse when the treasurer changes. The whole site can be exported free at any time, so you're not tied to us either. Handing it to the next lot is handing over an email address: they email us when they want something changed, same as you did.
The shed's story, added to as it happens
The site is finished the day it goes live. That's the honest premise of the whole thing: it's complete, it says when you're open and what you take on, and it can sit exactly as it is for as long as you like, free, forever. Hosting costs the shed nothing, there's no subscription to lapse, and a year where nothing changes costs nothing at all.
It can also grow, because we stay behind it. You email us what's new, we draft the change and send it back for someone to read, and it goes on the site once you've said yes. A batch of changes is $20, so it pays to save a few up and send them together, and a straightforward change can usually be done quickly. Nobody at the shed has to work on the site itself. Over the years that builds into something: photos going up when the big project finally ships, a page for the community work as it stacks up, the school job, the kindy planters, the bikes; new open mornings on the site the week they change; and the shed's own story getting deeper the longer you're going, instead of stopping at the paragraph somebody wrote at the start.
Every build can also include a site assistant, a plain way for a visitor to ask a question and get an answer drawn from the site's own words, nothing made up. It's included in the price and switched on only if you want it. Either way the whole lot is still the shed's: the domain in the shed's name, nothing monthly, and the site exportable free at any time.
One flat price, and a volunteer-run shed is what the community rate is for
Our standard price is $800, once. The community rate is $400, for organisations where $800 would genuinely be a stretch, and a shed running on subs and goodwill is exactly the shape it was written for. Same site, same care, same ownership at either rate, by rule.
The only cost we don't carry: your domain name, about $65 a year, because it must be registered in the shed's name, not ours. That's the deed. Changes later are $20 for a batch of edits, whenever you actually want one, and a year where nothing changes costs nothing. Whether the community rate applies is a one-line email: how we make that call.
Asked and answered, plainly
The sums behind the price
What the whole market charges, honestly mapped: what a website really costs in New Zealand. Why owning beats renting for an organisation that plans to exist in ten years: owning vs renting your website. Whether the $400 rate applies to you: who qualifies for the community rate. The whole process from first email to handover: how it works.
Tell us about it in a sentence
Where you are, when you're open, and what you have now, even if it's just a Facebook page. We'll be straight about whether we can help and what it would cost.