Website Design in Cairns: What It Costs and What You Should Get

Most people looking for website design in Cairns are asking the same three questions. What does it cost, what am I actually getting and how do I avoid getting burned. Fair questions. Here are straight answers.

What a website is actually for

Your website has one job. Turn the people who land on it into enquiries or sales. Everything else, the animations, the colour palette, the clever copy, exists to serve that job.

A lot of Cairns businesses have websites that look fine and do nothing. They load slowly, bury the contact details, say nothing specific about who they help and give Google no reason to rank them. Looking fine is not the bar. Working is.

What website design costs in Cairns

Rough guide, based on what we see quoted around town:

• Under $1,500 usually means a template with your logo dropped in. Fine for a hobby, risky for a business
• $3,000 to $8,000 gets a properly designed small business site with custom design, mobile-first build and SEO foundations
• $8,000 to $20,000+ covers larger sites, ecommerce stores and anything with custom functionality

If a quote seems too cheap, something is missing. Usually it's the strategy, the SEO structure or your ownership of the finished site.

What should be included

Whoever you hire, make sure the quote covers custom design (not a purchased theme), mobile-first build, page speed optimisation, SEO foundations, structure that AI search tools like ChatGPT can read and a training session so you can update content yourself. You should own the site, the domain and the hosting account outright.

That last point matters. We regularly meet businesses held to ransom by a previous provider who owns their domain or won't hand over site access. Get ownership in writing before you pay a deposit.

Red flags to watch for

No process for understanding your business before designing. No mention of mobile. Hosting bundled in a way you can't leave. A portfolio full of sites that all look the same. Vague answers when you ask who owns what.

How we do it

Bang Media has been designing websites in Cairns since 2007, building on WordPress, Shopify and Webflow depending on what the business actually needs. Every build starts with a discovery session, ships fast and mobile-first, and comes with a recorded training session so you're never locked out of your own site.

If you're launching a new business and need branding as well, our Small Business Starter Pack bundles the two together. And once the site is live, getting traffic to it is a separate job. That's covered in our guide to getting more leads.

Want a real number for your project instead of a range? Get in touch and we'll give you one after a quick chat.