Melbourne reads typefaces. Melbourne reads layouts. Melbourne reads books.
Website design for Melbourne businesses, pairing editorial typography with Next.js. The same architecture behind Fine Touch Group’s growth from $250K to $1M in quarterly revenue.
Two real builds. Both still ranking. Both delivered remotely.
Editorial first
Type, hierarchy and white space are not finishing touches. They are the entire point. Built for clients whose customers will notice the difference.
Direct line to the founder
No account manager funnel, no ticketing queue. Enquire before 4pm and you hear back the same day. The founder is the designer and the developer.
You own everything
Code, domain, hosting. No platform fees, no 36 month contracts, no proprietary CMS. Pass it to a Melbourne dev whenever you want.
Published pricing. No Melbourne mark-up.
Editorial design at the same published price as our Sydney work. Fine Touch Group made back the cost of their entire build in the first week after launch.
Starter
$3,997Solo operators and Melbourne family businesses launching online.
- Up to 5 pages
- Editorial design, mobile-first
- Local SEO + LocalBusiness schema
- 100/100 Lighthouse, 3 to 5 days
- Full code ownership
Need it sooner?
Professional
$5,997Growing Melbourne businesses competing on Google Local.
- Up to 10 pages + blog/CMS
- Suburb pages + keyword research
- Lead capture + conversion tracking
- Copywriting included
- Google Business Profile setup
Need it sooner?
Premium
$9,997Established Melbourne operators with bookings, portals or integrations.
- Unlimited pages
- Booking system + client portal
- Custom integrations (CRM, Stripe, APIs)
- Priority support, unlimited revisions
Need it sooner?
50% upfront, 50% on delivery. Maintenance from $197/mo. Express delivery starts the build the next business morning and ships in half the standard timeline.
A Wix template will not survive a Melbourne customer.
Melbourne is the only Australian city UNESCO has designated a City of Literature. Your customer walks past Mag Nation, Readings, Hill of Content and a dozen independent print studios on the way to your shopfront. They look at type for a living, even when they do not realise it.
More about the Melbourne market
So when they pull up your website on a tram between Flinders and Southern Cross, they are not reading the copy. They are clocking the kerning, the line height, the load time, and deciding whether you look like a serious operator in 1.2 seconds.
“The sweet spot for Melbourne small businesses is $6,000 to $10,000 with strategy, design, build and basic SEO. Most agencies bill $120 to $200 an hour and ship in weeks.”
Cultivate Digital, Melbourne Website Cost Guide 2026
The Melbourne agency rates are real. The week long timelines are real. The slow WordPress builds are real. None of them have to be the cost of having a website that sits in a city this design literate.
Search demand in Melbourne
Source: DataForSEO, April 2026. Melbourne metro. Eight categories that say more about Melbourne than any other capital. Restaurants, brunch, bookshops, wine bars, architects.
Melbourne customers search for things to do, eat, read and look at constantly. Position one captures around 27% of the clicks.
The question is whether your business is the result they open, or the one they scroll past. A Wix template, a 5 second Squarespace shop, a hero image that fights the type instead of supporting it. Each one quietly hands the customer to the operator across the laneway who looks more serious about their craft.
Melbourne is many neighbourhoods. Your site should know which one.
A Carlton wine bar and a Hawthorn architect and a Brunswick physio sell to three different humans. Same tram network, different worlds. The voice, the type, the photography, and the suburbs we target on Google Business Profile all bend around your specific corner of the city.
Slow sites read as careless.
In a design literate city, a 5 second load is not a performance issue. It is a taste issue. We build on Next.js, the same framework as Stripe, TikTok and Uber. Sub-second loads on a phone on the 96 tram. Lighthouse hits 100 every time.
Four steps.
Under a week.
Sydney based, delivered to Melbourne remotely. Editorial typography, sub-second loads, the same restraint Melbourne print buyers respect. Built Brief Legal, Sub Tracker, and the Fine Touch Group site that scaled them from $250K to $1M in quarterly revenue.
Discovery call
15 minutes. We learn about your business, your customers, the suburbs you serve, and what is broken on the current site. You learn whether we are the right fit before anyone signs anything.
Design and build
We build on a proven small business architecture refined across dozens of Australian projects. You review a staging link in 3 to 5 days and request changes in plain English. No 80 page Figma file that never matches the live site.
Review and launch
Final revisions, content loaded, SEO checked, Google Business Profile aligned, analytics wired. We switch the domain with zero downtime and your old site disappears the moment the new one goes live.
Ongoing support
Optional maintenance from $197 a month. Or take the code and run it yourself with any Melbourne developer. Either way, you own everything from day one.
Same studio. Every Australian city.
Sydney based, building across Australia with the same Next.js architecture, published pricing and delivery timelines.
Melbourne questions.
Do you actually understand the Melbourne creative aesthetic?
The studio is built around editorial typography, generous white space, sub-second load times and the kind of restraint Melbourne print buyers have respected for decades. The fonts on this page (Editorial New for headlines, Neue Montreal for body, Supply Mono for technical detail) are the same fonts that ship on every Melbourne build. Look around the site. If it feels like the kind of work that could sit beside a Brunswick design studio’s print portfolio, that is deliberate.
How is this different from a Fitzroy or Brunswick design studio?
Most Melbourne studios are art directors first and engineers second. The work is gorgeous and the build is frequently a WordPress theme that loads in five seconds. Studio Slate is the inverse: editorial design taste paired with a Next.js engineering stack. Same architecture as Stripe, TikTok and Uber, finished with type and layout that does not embarrass itself in a city full of designers. You get the Brunswick aesthetic without the Squarespace performance penalty.
Why is your published pricing the same as Sydney?
There is no Melbourne mark-up and no Sydney mark-up. The studio publishes one set of prices for the whole country. A Carlton restaurant pays the same $3,997 as a Surry Hills one. The savings come from removing the agency overhead, not from where you happen to sit. Melbourne agencies typically charge $120 to $200 an hour and quote $5,000 to $12,000 for a small business build that takes weeks. We ship in days and the only line on the invoice is the work.
Are you Sydney based or Melbourne based?
Sydney based, delivered to Melbourne remotely. The kickoff is a 15 minute call, the build runs on a shared staging link with Loom walkthroughs, and the founder is on Slack the same hours your team is. Melbourne clients have the same access as the Sydney ones, including same day callbacks before 4pm. If a face to face matters at any point, the founder flies down. No travel fee, no minimum spend, no Melbourne premium.
Will the site rank for Melbourne suburbs and Google Business Profile?
Every site we ship is wired into Google Business Profile, has correct LocalBusiness schema for your suburbs and service areas, and uses suburb level pages where they make commercial sense. Local Electrical Solutions, a Sydney electrician, launched with no online presence and hit Google’s Local Pack across 10+ postcodes in 8 weeks with no ad spend on the same setup. The exact same approach works for a Carlton accountant or a Brunswick physio.
Do I get a real Australian invoice with GST?
Yes. Studio Slate is an Australian registered business with an ABN. Every invoice includes GST, your details, our details, and a Stripe payment link or direct bank transfer. No offshore billing, no PayPal-only setups, no surprises at tax time. Your accountant will be happy.
What if I want to take the site to a Melbourne developer later?
Take it. You own every line of code, your domain, and your hosting account on day one. We hand over a clean Next.js codebase any local Melbourne developer can pick up, plus documentation. No proprietary CMS, no platform lock-in, no 36 month hosting contract. Most clients stay because the maintenance is $197 a month and we already know the codebase. The door is unlocked from the moment we ship.
Build a site Melbourne will not scroll past.
15 minutes. No pitch deck. An honest read on what your current site is doing to the Melbourne customers landing on it right now.