Most website projects pick the platform before anyone's worked out what the site actually needs to do. A developer suggests what they build in, or a friend recommends what worked for them, or nobody really decides and the project just lands on whatever the last website was built on.
Our founder has worked with websites for more than 20 years, building them, marketing them, and managing them in-house. That's long enough to have watched a fair few businesses pay to rebuild a site two years in, simply because the platform never suited them to begin with. It's expensive, it's disruptive, and it was avoidable. So before you brief a designer, it's worth sitting with these five questions. They take an afternoon, where a rebuild takes a quarter.
1. Are you selling online, or chasing enquiries?
Everything else hangs off this one, so start here.
If you're selling products online, you need a platform built for ecommerce from the ground up: inventory, payments, shipping rules, GST, the automated email that follows up the shopper who left a full cart behind. You don't want any of that bolted on as an afterthought, because it tends to show when it is.
If the site's job is to bring in enquiries for a service business, all those ecommerce features just get in the way. You'll do far better with a well-built site and strong lead capture than with an online store that has nothing to sell.
Plenty of businesses live somewhere in the middle, though. A beauty salon that sells a few products alongside its services, or a health brand that sells direct but also supplies the shops. If that's you, lean the decision toward wherever the money actually comes in and factor in serious growth plan for one or the other business branch.
2. Who looks after it once it's live?
This is the part that gets forgotten in the excitement of a launch. A website isn't finished the day it goes live. Someone is in there most weeks after that, adding products, changing prices, swapping a banner, putting up a post.
So it's worth asking plainly who that person is. If it's your marketing manager, or you late on a Tuesday night, rather than a developer on call, then the platform has to be one a normal person can run without opening up code. Hosted platforms like Shopify quietly handle the updates, security and hosting in the background. Self-hosted platforms like WordPress hand you more control, and the maintenance that comes with it: the plugin updates, the security monitoring, the compatibility checks that someone actually has to do.
Neither is the wrong choice. But choosing the hands-on option when you haven't got the hands to do the work is how a site falls out of date and stays there.
3. What does it cost over three years, not on launch day?
The launch invoice is the number everyone compares, and it's also the one that doesn't tell you everything.
What you really want to know is the three-year cost: the platform fees, the hosting, the apps and plugins, the upkeep, and every change you'll pay someone to make along the way. A cheap build that needs a paid plugin for every basic feature and a developer for every small tweak has a way of quietly overtaking the dearer build you can manage yourself.
When we scope a Shopify project, we price it off the real build hours, so there's no unwelcome surprise waiting in month three. Whatever platform you land on, ask whoever's quoting to put a number on years two and three, not just the build itself. If they can't, that's worth knowing before you sign rather than after.
4. Will it still fit you in three years?
Picture where the business is heading, not just where it sits today. Maybe a second sales channel, or a push into Australia, or the point where you start selling online as well as taking enquiries. Maybe plugging your email, your accounting and your ad tracking into the site so they finally talk to each other.
Then ask two things of any platform. Can it do what you'll need without a workaround holding it together? And does it connect cleanly to the tools you already run? A site that fights your email platform or your analytics doesn't cost you just the once. It costs you a little time and a little reporting quality every month, and that quietly adds up to real money you never see leave.
5. Can it hold its own in search?
Any decent platform can rank these days. The real difference is whether it makes good SEO straightforward or makes you scrap for every inch of it.
You're after clean URLs, pages that load fast without a heavy tune-up, proper control over your titles and descriptions, and support for structured data. But don't stop at the platform, because this is where people come unstuck: a well-built site on an average platform will beat a sloppy site on a brilliant one nearly every time. The platform sets your ceiling, and the build decides whether you get anywhere near it.
Where Shopify fits
We build on Shopify, so it's only fair to be straight about when we'd point you to it and when we wouldn't.
It's a strong fit for product businesses that want reliable ecommerce without having to babysit the tech themselves. The hosting, security and updates are handled for you, the app store covers just about anything an NZ retailer runs into, and your marketing manager can drive the day-to-day without ringing a developer.
It's less likely to be a fit if the site is all articles and no products, or if you need something so custom it ends up wrestling the platform the whole way through. When that's the case, we'll tell you in the first call, because putting a client on the wrong platform costs us more down the track than it ever costs them.
Making the call
You don't need to be technical to make this decision well. You need honest answers to five questions: what the site is for, who runs it, what it truly costs, where you're headed, and whether it can be found. Work through those and the shortlist tends to get short fairly quickly.
And if you find yourself caught between two platforms, that's usually a sign the business side of the brief needs another look before the technology conversation, which is a far cheaper thing to discover now than halfway through a build.
Weighing up a website project? Book a growth strategy call and we'll work through the platform question with you before you commit to anything.