Maitland is the fastest-growing local government area in the Hunter. There were 89,597 people living in it at the 2021 census and it has kept climbing since. That is good news and a problem at the same time: more customers, and more businesses turning up to compete for them.
It matters for a website more than it sounds like it should. When a town fills up, a growing share of the people who need what you do have never heard of you, and never will unless they find you the way everybody finds things now, which is by typing it into a phone. Word of mouth still works. It just stops being enough on its own.
I build websites for small businesses out of the Hunter Valley. Custom code, no page builders and no templates, and every price is published on this site so you can work out whether this is worth a conversation before you have one.
The businesses that get left behind in a place like Maitland are rarely the bad ones. They are usually the ones everybody already knows about, which works beautifully right up until the people who already know about them stop being the majority. New streets fill with people who have no history with your business at all. To them, you exist if you turn up on a phone, and you do not exist if you don’t.
The other half of it is that whoever is competing with you often arrives with a website already, because that is simply how a business starts now. You can be twenty years better at the actual job and still lose the enquiry to somebody who has been trading six months, purely because they were the one who showed up when it got searched for.
A fair bit of what I do is not a first website. It is a second one, for somebody who paid for a site a few years back and has been quietly disappointed in it ever since. Slow on a phone, impossible to change without asking permission, or just nothing like what they thought they were buying.
If that is where you are, send me the address before you do anything else. I will tell you straight whether it is worth fixing or worth starting again, and that answer costs nothing. Sometimes the honest version is that the site is fine and something else is the problem, and I would rather say so than sell you a rebuild you never needed.
Search on a phone leans heavily on where the person is standing, so a business here is mostly competing with other businesses in and around Maitland rather than with the whole country. That is a far smaller fight than it sounds like, and it is one of the few parts of getting found that you can genuinely do something about.
The practical version: the site says plainly where you are and what you cover, each service gets enough room to be a page of its own instead of a line on a list, and the Google listing people actually tap gets looked after alongside the website. That last one is not a website job at all, which is exactly why it ends up forgotten. On the Advanced plan and up I do it every month.
You should not have to get on a phone call to find out whether you can afford something. Every build is a “from” price, because a five page site and a fifteen page site are not the same job, and you get the real number in writing before you agree to anything.
from $1,200
One page that does one job: get you the phone call.
from $1,950
Up to four pages. A new site or a redesign of the one you’ve got.
from $3,900
Up to eight pages, so every service gets one of its own.
from $6,500
Ten pages or more, mapped out properly before anything gets built.
Every build includes your first month of me looking after the site and your Google listing. After that, keeping me on starts at $99 a month, and you can stop whenever you like. The full pricing page has what is in each one, the monthly plans and the add-ons, and a note on what a build does not cover.
I have not built a site for a Maitland business yet, and I am not going to dress that up as something else. Here are two I have built, both live, one of them up the valley in Muswellbrook.
Live siteVirtual assistant & business support
Website for Paige, a virtual assistant who handles content, admin, project support and UGC for small business owners. Rebuilt around a Work with Me page that turns her Instagram following into enquiries, alongside the digital guides shop she already had.
“Great experience, my website is exactly what I wanted. Easy to talk to and work with, highly recommend.”
Live siteHealth & recovery studio
Website for Muswellbrook’s only dedicated recovery studio: infrared sauna, ice bath, compression boots, cryotherapy and more under one roof. Built to explain seven different sessions to people who have never tried any of them, then get them booked in.
“Ben just got it. He took the time to understand my business, what I stand for and, more importantly, how I need to come across to potential clients. His communication is exceptional, he works bloody quickly and he made the whole process feel easy.”
Both case studies in full cover what the problem was, what got built and what it does now.
If you are running something in Maitland and you are not sure a website would actually earn its keep, that is a fair question to put to me. I will tell you if the answer is no.
I work right across the Hunter Valley, and with small businesses everywhere else in Australia.
Tell me where your business is at. If you’ve already got a website, send the link and I’ll tell you straight what’s letting it down. If you haven’t, we work out together whether one would earn its keep.
