A website for your trade business
New Zealand runs on tradies. This page is written for the ones working on their own or with a hand or two: one van, one phone, and a name that gets passed on by people who were happy with the job. Our offer to them is a proper website, built around the work you actually do, for a one-off price, owned outright in your own name, with nothing monthly behind it, ever.
Last updated July 2026
The front doorThey already have your name. They're checking you before they ring.
Word of mouth is the best lead there is, and nothing on this page replaces it. What has changed is what happens between the recommendation and the phone call. Someone gets handed your name at the school gate or in a group chat, and before they ring it they put it into their phone. What comes back is either something that looks like a real business, or nothing, or the outfit up the road who did put a page up. That last step is where a recommendation quietly goes missing, and you never hear about it.
Then there's the other half, the people who don't have your name yet. When the hot water goes or the fence comes down, they search the trade and their own suburb. Those searches are answered by websites and map listings. If nothing of yours is in that answer, you're not in the running for any of it, no matter how good you are on the tools.
The apps that sell you leads sit in the middle of both. They can be worth it, and we'd never tell you to drop something that pays its way. Just be clear about what you're buying: they mostly work the same way, a monthly fee that buys credits, and a credit comes off each time you connect with a customer who is usually talking to two or three others as well. That is a real channel. It just isn't yours. Your own site is the one place where nobody stands between you and the person ringing, and nobody can change the terms on you next year.
And the honest other side: if you're booked out months ahead on word of mouth and the phone never stops, you may not need us at all. We'd rather say that here than waste your evening.
What a tradie's website actually needs
Not much, done well. What you do, and just as usefully what you don't. The areas you actually cover. Photos of finished work. Something honest about how you work, whether you quote free, and what happens after you've said yes. And your phone number at the top of every page, big enough to tap with a thumb, because on your own site nobody is hiding it behind a form or charging you for the call.
The photos do most of the persuading. A deck before and after, a bathroom stripped and finished, a lawn you've squared up: that is the trust currency in this trade, and nothing written can stand in for it. They don't need a photographer. A phone photo of finished work in daylight is the right kind of photo, and it reads as true in a way a stock picture of somebody in a hi-vis never does.
On areas, we only write up the places you genuinely go. A page for every suburb in the region when you'd never drive half of them is an old trick that search engines have been marking down for years, and it puts you in front of people you'd only have to turn away. Honest coverage, said plainly, works better and lasts longer.
What it doesn't need: a booking platform, a monthly plan, a chat widget nobody answers, or a gallery that takes ten seconds to load on a site visit with one bar of signal. We build small, fast, plain sites on purpose. They cost almost nothing to keep online, which is why hosting is free.
A profile is rented shelf space. A site is your own shopfront.
You wouldn't run the business out of a shop where the landlord can put the rent up without telling you, move you to the back of the building, or shut the doors on a Tuesday. That's what a profile on someone else's platform is. The fees change, the order you appear in changes, the terms change, and every good word you earned sits on their side of the fence. Stop paying and it all goes quiet, and none of it was ever yours to take with you.
Your trading name is the asset here. You've spent years putting it on a van and on invoices and into people's mouths. It should live somewhere you own. The domain is registered in your name, never ours, and it's yours to move whenever you like. Hosting is free, so there's no subscription quietly ticking over through a slow winter. The whole site exports free at any time, so you're not locked to us either. That's what the name means: in New Zealand, freehold is land you own outright, not a tenancy on it.
Finished on day one, and still growing in five years
To see what this looks like built, we made a fictional site for a two-van rural electrician: Backroads Electrical. Every real build starts from your own world, not from that one.
Here's the honest premise. The site is complete when it goes live. Every page written, every photo placed, nothing half done and nothing waiting on you. If you never send us another word, it sits there working, for free, for as long as you want it. Plenty of sites should do exactly that, and that's a good outcome, not a failure.
But it can grow, because we stay behind it. You email us what's new, a few photos off the phone, a line about the gear you've just bought, and we draft the change, you check it reads true, and we put it up. $20 a batch, so it pays to save a few up, and it can usually be back with you quickly. No account to log into, no fiddling with the site yourself at ten at night. You send it, we do it.
Which is how a small site turns into a good one over a few years. The job gallery grows a handful of photos at a time, and by year five there are dozens of finished jobs on there, which is the point where people stop shopping around and just ring. A suburb you've started working properly gets its own page, so the person searching their own street name finds something that actually names it, and we only ever do that for the places you really cover. A customer says something decent in a text, and with their okay that line goes on the site under their first name. You buy the digger, or get the ticket, or take on the roof work, and that becomes a new service page instead of a sentence nobody notices.
Every build can also include a site assistant if you want one: a quiet helper that answers a visitor's questions using nothing but the words already on your site, so someone at nine at night gets a straight answer instead of a form. It's included in the price, and it's switched on only if you'd like it.
All of it stays yours. The additions, the photos, the words, the domain. Nothing monthly, ever, and the whole thing exports free any time you want to take it somewhere else.
One flat price, and nothing monthly behind it
Our standard price is $800, once. That's the whole build: a full multi-page site, written and designed around your work, not a template with your trading name dropped into it. No plan, no monthly fee, no renewal that creeps up in year three.
There is also a $400 community rate, and we'd rather tell you it exists than let you assume it doesn't. It's for people where $800 would genuinely be a stretch: someone just gone out on their own, or building the business up alongside another job. The test is one question, could you comfortably pay $800? If the honest answer is yes, the standard rate is the fair one, and paying it is part of what keeps the other rate open for someone else. Same site, same care, same ownership at either rate, by rule. Here's how we make that call.
The only cost we don't carry: your domain name, about $65 a year, because it has to be registered in your name and 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. Hosting is free, export is free, and there is nothing monthly, ever.
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 when your trading name is the asset: 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 the work in a sentence
What you do, where you cover, and what you have now, even if that's a Facebook page or nothing at all. We'll be straight about whether we can help and what it would cost.