Web design in Maitland, NSW: two towns, and most quotes never ask which one you are.

Thornton, Chisholm, Gillieston Heights, Farley and Aberglasslyn have put a great many new homes into this LGA in a short time, and every one of those households needs a plumber, a sparky, a landscaper and a dentist that they have no reason to have heard of.

That is a genuinely unusual market. In an established suburb most trade comes from somebody who knows somebody, and search is the second option. In a new estate there is no somebody, so the phone is the first option and the search is the whole introduction.

It also means the people searching have no local frame of reference. They do not know which end of town you are, whether Morpeth is close, or what counts as a reasonable drive here, so a site that assumes local knowledge loses them.

The practical version of that is dull and decisive: name the estates. A trade page that lists Thornton, Chisholm and Gillieston Heights is answering the only question a new resident is really asking, which is whether you come out this far.

High Street, Morpeth and the heritage precinct sell to visitors and to people who came for the character. Green Hills and the estates sell to residents doing ordinary business. A website built for one is the wrong shape for the other.

A Morpeth cafe, gallery or accommodation business is competing for somebody planning a weekend, often from Sydney or Newcastle, deciding on photographs and on whether the place looks worth the drive. That site is a shopfront and it lives or dies on the pictures and the booking.

A trade working the estates is competing for somebody with a problem today. That site does not need to be beautiful; it needs to answer what you do, where you go and how to reach you, inside about eight seconds.

Getting this backwards is the most common expensive mistake in town. A trade pays for a photography-led brochure site and wonders why the phone did not change, and a visitor business gets a plain functional site and loses the booking to somewhere that looked better.

Which one you are, and what it needs

• Visitor and heritage.

  Photographs that are actually yours, and a booking that works on a phone in one go.

• Trades and services.

  The suburbs named, the number reachable in one tap, and what you do stated in plain words at the top.

• Retail around Green Hills.

  Opening hours that are right and a listing that matches the site. Most of that traffic starts on a map, not on a search.

Maitland is thirty minutes from Newcastle, close enough that Newcastle agencies sell here and far enough that they rarely come out. So a Maitland business collects a Newcastle quote and a local quote and cannot tell what the difference buys.

Some of that difference is real and some of it is an office in town. What it almost never is is the finished website: two sites can be equally good and differ in price by a factor of three because of what sits behind the invoice.

We are in Wickham, which makes us one of the Newcastle quotes, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What we will do is tell you which of the three kinds of build you actually need before anybody puts a number on it.

The question that separates quotes is not design. It is who owns the accounts afterwards, what a change costs in year two, and whether the thing was built to be found or only to be looked at.

Four questions, and the answers should be in writing. Whose name the domain is in, who holds the hosting and logins, what a change costs once it is finished, and who is responsible for it in eighteen months.

The reason those four matter here specifically is turnover. A lot of Maitland sites were built well by somebody who has since moved on, and the site did not break, it just stopped being current. Wrong hours, a service you no longer offer, a copyright date that gives away the year.

Those details are exactly what a stranger uses to decide whether a business is still trading, and in a town where a lot of the customers are new arrivals with no other information, a site that looks abandoned reads as a business that might not answer.

The four questions

• Whose name is the domain in?

  Yours. A domain in a builder's account is the hardest thing of all to get back.

• Who holds the hosting and the logins?

  Same answer, and you should have seen them.

• What does a change cost after it goes live?

  A real number and a real turnaround, not goodwill.

• Who is looking after it in eighteen months?

  If nobody has said, nobody has thought about it.