You've probably done the search. "Web designer Cairns". Twenty-something results. Half rank because they spend on Google Ads. A few are out-of-towners with a Cairns landing page. The rest all promise the same things: fast, beautiful, SEO-optimised, conversion-focused, results-driven.
How are you supposed to choose between them?
This guide answers that. Not by telling you who to hire. By giving you the criteria so you can decide for yourself. Bang Media wrote it, so we have skin in the game. We back ourselves to come out well. Use the framework however you like, including to score us against everyone else.
Most agencies skip this question because the answer might cost them a sale. We'll ask it anyway.
Three diagnostics.
Is your traffic the problem, or your conversion the problem?
If people aren't landing on your site, you have a marketing or SEO issue. A new website won't fix that on its own. If they're landing but not enquiring, you have a content, design or trust issue. Different fix entirely. Spend money in the wrong place and you'll be back here in eighteen months wondering why nothing changed.
Is your site genuinely outdated, or are you just bored of it?
Bored is not a strategic reason to rebuild. It's expensive boredom. The site that worked last year is probably still working. Run the numbers before you run the rebuild.
Are leads coming in, but the wrong leads?
That's a targeting problem. Your website might be doing its job perfectly. The problem is upstream in your marketing. A new site won't filter for better-fit customers if the messaging stays the same.
If you've worked through those and still believe a rebuild is the right move, keep reading. If you're not sure, save your money. Talk to a marketing strategist before you talk to a designer. We're happy to be that strategist for half an hour if it stops you spending forty grand on the wrong thing.
Five buckets. Each one has a job to do. Pick the wrong bucket and the price tag won't matter.
1. DIY platforms
Wix, GoDaddy builders and similar DIY drag-and-drop platforms. Free to about $50 a month. Works for pre-revenue side hustles, hobby projects and businesses where the website really is just a digital business card. Don't pick this if you actually want the site to bring in business. The platforms can do it. The execution rarely does.
2. Solo freelancer
$1,500 to $6,000 for a build. Good for simple brochure sites where the brief is clear and the scope is tight. Avoid when you need strategy, ongoing support or a deeper bench of skills. One person can't be a designer, developer, copywriter, SEO specialist and project manager all at once. They'll do a couple well and the rest poorly.
3. Cheap offshore agency
$2,000 to $8,000. Communication overhead and revision cycles eat the savings. Time zones make iteration painful. Quality is unpredictable. Sometimes fine, sometimes a disaster, hard to know which until you're three months in. Pick this if your scope is bulletproof and your project manager is sharp. Otherwise the savings are imaginary.
4. Local specialist or boutique
$5,000 to $15,000. The sweet spot for most established Cairns SMBs. Real human you can call. Project size that fits the team. The limitation is depth. If you need video, photography, paid ads and brand work alongside the website, you'll likely need to manage multiple suppliers.
5. Full creative agency
$8,000 to $40,000+. The right pick when the website is one of several marketing assets that need to work together. Brand, video, photography, ad creative and ongoing strategy under one roof. More expensive, more capable. Overkill if all you need is a five-page brochure site.
Bang Media sits in bucket five. We'd be the first to tell you if you're better off in bucket four.
Real numbers. Most agencies won't publish them. We will.
Brochure site (5 to 8 pages, lead-generation focused)
$4,000 to $12,000. The variation comes from copywriting, content production, integrations and how custom the design is. A template-led build with stock content sits at the lower end. A custom design with original photography, copy and an integrated CRM lands toward the top.
E-commerce site (Shopify or WooCommerce)
$8,000 to $25,000. Number of products, payment gateway complexity, custom collections, third-party integrations (inventory, shipping, accounting) and ongoing support all push the price. Anyone quoting under five grand for a real e-commerce site is selling you a template with no support attached.
Custom build with integrations or memberships
$15,000 to $60,000+. Booking systems, member portals, custom databases, multi-language sites, complex form workflows. These are software projects more than they are design projects. The price reflects that.
Hosting and maintenance
$50 to $400 per month. Depends on platform, traffic, support hours and how much hand-holding you want. Cheap shared hosting is fine for a small brochure site. E-commerce or membership sites need something more serious.
Hidden costs to ask about up front. Domain registration. SSL certificate. Premium plugin licences. Stock photography or original photography. Copywriting. Ongoing SEO. Hosting upgrades when traffic grows. Third-party integrations like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Calendly or Stripe. Most agencies bury at least three of these in the fine print.
If a quote doesn't break out the recurring costs separately from the build cost, ask. You're about to sign up for years of recurring spend, not a one-off invoice.
Most "what to look for" lists are padding. These eight aren't.
Did they ask about your business, your customers, your goals and your competitors before they showed you a colour palette? If the first call was a presentation of pretty templates, they're selling decoration not a tool. The website is supposed to do a job. The brief should start with the job.
Sometimes it matters. Sometimes it doesn't. It matters when the project involves photography, video, brand workshops or close collaboration with multiple stakeholders. It doesn't matter when the spec is tight and the work is purely technical. Don't pay a premium for "local" when local has nothing to do with the work being done.
You should own your domain, your hosting account, your design files and your CMS. Full stop. If any of those live in the agency's name, you don't own your website. You rent it.
The trap that catches the most Cairns businesses is the proprietary CMS. The agency builds your site on their own custom-coded content management system. Looks fine while you're working with them. Then a couple of years pass and you decide it's time for a change. That's when you discover nobody else can edit, host or migrate the site. Your only two options are to stay locked in indefinitely or rebuild from scratch with a new agency. We've seen this exact situation play out for businesses across Cairns and Far North Queensland more times than we can count.
It usually comes with a forced "refresh" every few years that conveniently lines up with contract renewal time. The agency calls it modernisation. Realistically it's the only way to keep upgrading the platform you can't move off.
Stick with mainstream platforms where you genuinely have a way out. WordPress, Webflow and Shopify are the three that matter. If an agency is selling you their own custom CMS, ask them to put migration rights in writing. They usually can't, because they can't.
Ask for ownership answers in writing. If they hesitate, walk.
WordPress, Webflow and Shopify all have legitimate use cases. WordPress is the workhorse for content-heavy sites and serious SEO. Webflow is the design-led choice for marketing sites that need to look sharp and move fast. Shopify is the default for serious e-commerce.
An agency that only sells one platform sees one type of project. If they tell you everything should be WordPress regardless of context, they're not picking the best tool. They're picking the only tool they have.
The bigger warning sits with agencies pitching their own proprietary or custom CMS. The pitch is usually framed as "purpose-built for your business", "more flexible than off-the-shelf solutions" or "a no-code platform we developed in-house". The reality is that you can't move it, no other agency can support it, and when you eventually want to leave you'll be quoted a full rebuild.
Be especially careful with the "no-code" framing. A genuine no-code platform is something like Webflow where you can edit and migrate freely. A custom-built no-code platform from a single agency is usually heavily customised code that only their team can touch. The label sounds reassuring. The reality is the opposite. We covered this in more detail here if you want the longer version.
There are very few projects that genuinely need a custom CMS. If yours doesn't, don't accept one.
Speed, structured data, accessibility, mobile UX and AEO formatting (more on that below). These should be in the build, not added as upsells. If the proposal lists "SEO" as a separate $2,000 line item after the build, the build itself wasn't done with SEO in mind. That's backwards.
Pretty thumbnails are easy. Numbers are harder. Ask the agency: what was the traffic before and after? What's the conversion rate now? How many leads per month is this site generating? What's the average session duration? If they can't answer, they don't measure their own work. That should worry you more than a slightly dated portfolio.
While you're looking, check whether the work is actually custom. Two patterns to watch for in 2026.
The first is AI-generated copy and design dressed up as bespoke creative. The tells: generic stock-style imagery that doesn't quite fit, copy that sounds plausible but says nothing specific, repeating layout patterns across unrelated client sites, and a curious lack of original photography or video. AI tools have a place in the production process. They don't replace strategy, brand thinking or original creative. If the portfolio looks like everyone else's portfolio, ask what the human input actually was.
The second is the same template recycled across hundreds of clients with the colours swapped. Look at five or six recent sites the agency has built. If the structure, page layouts and component patterns look identical with just the brand assets changed, you're being sold a template, not a custom build. The price quoted should reflect that.
Not a one-page proposal in a Google Doc. A real scope, a real timeline, a real revision policy and a real out clause if the project goes sideways. Anyone running serious agency work has these documents ready to send. If the contract is vague, the project will be vague.
Three options: hourly support, retainer, or radio silence after launch. Each has a place. Hourly works for established sites that only need occasional updates. Retainer works for businesses that want ongoing optimisation, content and improvements. Radio silence is what most cheap builds ship with. They'll happily charge you $400 to change a phone number eighteen months after launch because they have no other way to monetise the relationship.
Pick the model that fits how you actually use a website. Then make sure it's in the contract.
Quick list. If you see two or more of these, run.
The last one is worth a quick note. Aggressive content marketing is fine and effective. Tactics that violate Google's guidelines are not. Ask the agency to walk you through their SEO methodology. If the answer is vague or focuses on volume of backlinks without explaining where they come from, treat it as a warning.
The proprietary CMS one is more common than you'd think in Cairns. Always check who's listed as the registrant on your domain and what platform your site is genuinely built on. If you can't get into your own registrar account, you don't actually control your own URL. If your CMS only works with one specific agency, you don't actually control your own website.
These are the questions that surface the truth. Group them by area so you can score systematically across multiple agencies.
How will you understand my business before designing? Who runs that process? What does it cost?
A good answer: a structured discovery process with named deliverables and a defined scope. A weak answer: "we'll have a chat and get started".
What CMS will you use and why? Who owns the design files? Can I edit content myself without paying you? What plugins or third-party tools will the site rely on?
A good answer is platform-justified, not platform-loyal. They should be able to explain why this CMS for this project, not "WordPress because that's what we always use".
Whose name is the domain registered in? Whose hosting account? Can I take everything with me if I leave? What's your offboarding process if we part ways?
A good answer: yours, yours, yes, and here's our written offboarding policy.
What page speed targets do you build to? What's your SEO baseline? Do you optimise for mobile first? What about AEO and AI search?
A good answer includes specifics. Lighthouse 90+, sub-two-second load times, schema markup as standard. A weak answer is "yes we do SEO".
What does post-launch support look like? Is it hourly, retainer or ad hoc? What's your response time? What happens when something breaks at 4pm on a Friday?
A good answer is honest about what's in the agreement and what costs extra. The Friday afternoon emergency question separates the serious agencies from the freelancers.
Realistic timelines for most builds.
Total realistic range: 6 to 12 weeks for most projects. Larger custom builds run longer. Anyone promising two weeks for a real custom build is either selling you a template with a custom logo or about to disappoint you.
Your role matters as much as the agency's. The biggest cause of project blowouts is client-side delay. Late content, late feedback, late approvals. Block out time at the start. Treat it like a project, not a side task. The faster you respond, the faster the project moves and the more you get for your money.
When local matters: collaborative brand work, video and photo production, in-person workshops, complex stakeholder projects, anything that benefits from being in a room together.
When local doesn't matter: simple brochure sites, technical maintenance, specialised platforms where the right expert happens to live interstate or overseas.
When offshore makes sense: pure development work on a tight technical spec, white-label builds where another agency manages the relationship, large rebuilds where you have an internal project manager who can handle daily standups across time zones.
Bang competes with all three on different projects. So does every serious agency. Don't let "we're local" be the deciding factor on its own. Let outcomes decide.
This is the part most agencies haven't caught up on yet.
Buyers in 2026 don't always go to Google first. They ask ChatGPT. They use Perplexity. They get answers in Google's AI Overviews before they ever click a result. The query that used to send a hundred people to your homepage now sends thirty, because seventy got the answer they needed in the AI response.
AEO (answer engine optimisation) is the new layer on top of SEO. It's about being cited in AI answers, not just ranked in search results. The format that wins: clear question-and-answer structure, structured data, specific numerical answers, FAQ schema, content written so an AI can quote a single paragraph as a standalone answer.
Most local agencies haven't adapted because most local agencies aren't paying attention. Ask whoever you're considering: how do you build for AEO? If they look blank, that's a tell. If they say "we do schema markup, FAQ blocks and structured content as standard", that's a different conversation.
Your website needs to win twice now. Once with humans. Once with the AI engines that increasingly answer for them.
Five things if you only read this far.
If you'd like a thirty-minute call to talk through your situation, no pressure and no obligation, we're up for it. Even if you end up choosing someone else. We'd rather you make the right call than the Bang call.
