Web development in Newcastle, NSW: a website built to work.

It is turning a design into a working site. The pages, the forms, whatever the site connects to, and the setup that decides how fast it loads and how easily anybody can change it later.

Most small business sites do not need much development at all, and that is worth saying on a page selling it. A handful of pages, a contact form and fast loading covers what most Newcastle businesses need.

Development becomes the job when the site has to actually do something. Take a booking against a real calendar, show stock, price something, sign somebody in, or talk to whatever software the business already runs on.

What it covers

• Building the pages themselves.

  Turning a design into something a browser loads, on every screen size, without falling apart on a phone.

• Anything a visitor submits.

  Forms, bookings, payments. Anything where a customer puts information in and expects something back.

• The connections to other software.

  Job software, the calendar, the accounting, the email list. This is where the time goes on most real builds.

• How it is hosted and deployed.

  Where the site runs, and how a change gets from somebody's screen to the live site without taking it down.

The build decides how fast the site is, whether it keeps working, and how much a small change costs a year from now. All three are invisible on launch day and all three are what you live with.

Speed is read by Google as well as by customers, so a slow site turns up in two places rather than one. Google publishes what it measures in its core web vitals, and the numbers are the ones a phone on a normal connection actually sees.

The change cost is the part nobody asks about beforehand. A site built out of plugins stacked on plugins can be cheap to launch and expensive to touch, and that bill arrives in year two.

Neither of those shows up at handover, so they are worth asking about before a deposit rather than afterwards.

Almost always the pictures, the plugins and the fonts. A site gets slow by accumulation rather than by one decision, which is why it feels fine at launch and heavy a year later.

Building a shop is a different job again, because most of the work sits behind the buy button rather than in front of it.

Slowness is rarely one dramatic fault. It is a photograph straight off a camera at ten times the size it displays at, then a plugin, then another plugin, then a font nobody ever looks at.

Where the weight comes from

• Pictures loaded at the wrong size.

  The most common cause by a distance. A photograph sized for print, being downloaded onto a phone.

• Plugins doing very little.

  Each one loads its own code on every single page, whether or not that page uses any of it.

• Extra fonts nobody notices.

  Every additional weight is another file that has to arrive before any text can appear on the screen.

• Cheap shared hosting.

  Hundreds of sites on one machine. On the day one of them is busy, yours is the one that feels slow.

The fixes are unremarkable and they work. Resize the pictures, remove what is not being used, and put the site somewhere that is not overloaded. Most of the gain on a small site comes from those three.

The code, the domain, the hosting account, and a way to take a copy whenever you want. Anything you cannot take somewhere else is rented, whatever the invoice happened to call it.

This is worth agreeing in writing before anybody starts. It is cheap to agree at the beginning and expensive to argue about later.

What comes back at the end

• The code itself.

  In a place the business controls, with a copy that can be handed to another developer without asking permission.

• The domain name.

  Registered in the business name, tied to the ABN, with the renewal date somewhere somebody will actually see it.

• The hosting account.

  In the business's own name, with the logins. Not sitting inside an agency's reseller account.

• A way to take a copy.

  The whole site and whatever it stores, on demand, with no fee attached to the asking.

Registering the business name properly is worth doing at the same time. business.gov.au is where that happens, and the name registered there is the one belonging on the domain.

Agree what the site has to do, and what you walk away with at the end. It is built out of sight, everything that submits is tested, and it launches on a quiet morning.

The launch is the smallest part. Everything that makes it go smoothly happened weeks earlier.

1. Write down what it has to do

Not what it should look like. What a visitor does on it, and what has to happen afterwards. Bookings, quotes, payments, or none of those at all.

2. Agree what you walk away with

The code, the domain, the hosting, and how a copy gets taken. In writing, before any deposit changes hands.

3. Build it where nobody can see it

On an address that is not the live site and is closed to search engines, so half a website never ends up in Google.

4. Test everything that submits

Every form, from a phone, with a real address behind it. The most common launch fault of all is a contact form that quietly goes nowhere.

5. It launches on a quiet morning

Never a Friday afternoon. The old site stays reachable until the new one is certain, and every old address points at its replacement.

6. Watch it for a fortnight

Errors, forms arriving, and the pages that used to bring visitors still bringing them. This is when a missed redirect shows itself.

The content is the slow part on nearly every build. The pages themselves go quickly, and waiting on photographs and words is what stretches a job out.

The order it happens in

• First what it has to do is agreed.

  Along with what you walk away with at the end. Nobody builds anything yet, and this part decides the price.

• Then the build happens out of sight.

  Pages, forms, and whatever the site connects to, all reviewed on a private address first.

• Then it launches, and somebody watches it.

  A quiet morning, old addresses pointed at new ones, then a fortnight of checking things arrive.

Where a build is running late, the reason is nearly always that the photographs and the words are still coming. That is worth knowing at the start, because it is the one part a business can get ahead of.

Ask what the site is built on, who holds the code, what a small change costs afterwards, and what happens if you leave. The change cost separates a launch from an arrangement.

These are worth asking of any developer, including this one, so the answers given here are underneath each question.

• What is it built on?

  A plain answer another developer would recognise. Something only one agency can touch is a decision worth making deliberately.

• Who holds the code?

  The business does. It goes into an account in the client's own name from the very first day.

• What does a small change cost afterwards?

  A rate, and roughly how long a typical change takes. This is the bill that turns up in year two.

• What happens if I leave?

  A copy of everything, and no fee attached to asking for it.

Plenty of Newcastle businesses run perfectly good sites they built themselves on a website builder. The point to bring somebody in is when the site has to do something the builder cannot.

A site that is hard for some customers to read is a separate fault, and website accessibility covers the four faults that cause most of it.