Who are the top 7 Best Web Designers in Cairns?
You might be searching for a web designer or an agency in Far North Queensland and Cairns and just absolutely blown away by the variety of agencies and the different types of sites out there. I was, I originally Googled “Web Design Cairns” and counted 20 different provider in the Cairns area and with 160,000 people that’s still a considerable number of competitors.
For many website customers making a fair comparison can be really confusing. What’s the important factors to consider? Is it website architecture and hosting or is it their ability to make something look pretty.
I’ll try not to make that too obvious as I don’t make a habit out of running down my competitors publicly. It’s not a good look unless of course they deserve it.
You, the business owner probably should care about one simple thing “results”.
Bonus: 13 Awesome questions to ask your Cairns Web Designer
But it’s not the whole story there are many different ingredients to consider as your site is not only an asset but a long term liability. Here’s a a few that were relevant from the competition listed below and questions you can ask your next web design agency.
Q. How much is a website?
A. I would expect between $5k – $20k. This is like how long is a piece of string and needs extra questions to figure out the required deliverables. It comes down to hours but they won’t tell you that as we all hate working for hours.
Q. Where are you based?
A. This is important to some customers as they like a face to face an also investing in their own community. It’s unfortunately less and less something customers care about when compared to cost and reliability. As far as I can tell everyone below has a local or semi-local presence.
Q. Who does the copy for my website and is it extra? Do you expect me to write it?
A. Expect that the agency does an original write up in what’s called a content planner based on your input or something you’ve already had written and then you’ll either be happy with what they put together or need to re-write but use it as a starting block.
Q. Do you include professional photography or videography?
A. You absolutely should only use professional “real” professional photography if you can. It should be included with the project the web designer should be breifing the photography on the type of photography to go for to fit the website strategy.
Q. Is my domain registered in my name with my email if I wish to transfer it I can do so?
A. You absolutely want it in your name and if the domain registrant email is changed then you can’t easily move it. They’ll use an excuse that it’s part of management or something else to add their domain on as the registrant. Noting there are 3 other areas for their email to go into.
Q. Do you use an open source platform for my website that I can move to any web designer at any time if needed?
A. Super important do not accept the answer they have their own CMS or a DIY SaaS solution or some other unknown. Only go for WordPress.
Q. What is the expected timeframe?
A. Expect 3-6 months to get it done well, remember they probably have 10 projects on at the same time and will be waiting on photography, copy and other things during this time.
Q. Tell me why I should have my website hosted and managed by you?
A. It’s absolutely not just about hosting and this is where it get’s confusing. You can’t compare a $100 per year charge from a budget hoster to be the same as a $1200 per year package from an agency. Think security, think maintenance, service and support.
Q. Tell me about my yearly licensing you’ve used to build my website and hosting/management costs?
A. Expect a few licenses usually packaged with your yearly or monthly plan. Some may be premium and on top. Sometimes website owners may even pay for these directly themselves but if this is the case it gets messy quickly. Some plugins can be up to $2k per year so be careful as you may end up with tech debt that you don’t want to pay if you move away. Ongoing hosting/management/care fees should range from $70 – $300 per month depending on the size of the site and inclusions.
Q. Can you just do the design and build for me and I’ll take care of everything else?
A. The agency is going to hate this question and I’d expect a “no, sorry that’s not the way we work”. Remember they’re got a business to run and a website needs ongoing updates and care and if they’re going to give it their “absolute best”, of course they want that ongoing relationship with you fuel’d by your hard earnt cash.
Q. What are the payment terms?
A. Agencies and Freelancers will usually take a percentage up front and only deliver on launch of the project if the remainder is paid. Some agencies will take 100% up front as they need to pay for external resources while they’re going.
Q. How do you measure success?
A. It’s a tough question and you’ll get multiple different answers here. Just make sure there’s an answer and not “ummm, I don’t know, do you think you website looks good?”. It should come back to goals of the project.
Q. Do you use CloudfFare for DNS?
A. I’m sorry. this is a very specific techie question, I can see your eyes glazing over already. Hang in there. CloudFlare offer some amazing features you won’t get from the basic DNS setup many, many IT type agencies continue to run. Not only will it improve your security through what they call proxy addresses. Best of all they can share DNS with anyone without transferring the domain or DNS control. Some, website hosting setups will also integrate directly with Cloudflare for automated updates for SSL and hosting IP changes. You know your marketing agency has been left behind if they intend on using some basic DNS management tool. (usually this is packaged with your monthly/yearly fees). If there’s excuses here from your provider continue to ask “why” until you feel comfortable with their answers.
Note: Don’t get suckered into the build your own website marketing which is full of lies. Yes, there’s some positives withe licensing but it’s offset by your fees and restrictions. You’ll regret it, leave it to agencies who have trained professionals who use real tools and know what tools are needed to get you results.
The top 7 website marketing agencies
Here are my top 7 website agencies/freelancers with the key advantages and disadvantages for each. I will note that this list is purely a subjective post based on my experience and knowledge around web design for the past 20+ years in the industry.
The below comparison is based on observation and some of the things may change over time which is why you need to note it’s the 1st of April 2025 and comments are made are around their websites and not necessarily the latest ones in their portfolio.
These are in no particular order other than Get Leads being our agency at the top. It’s also not a definitive list, I’ve not mentioned around 13 other agencies for various reasons. Sorry if one of them area yours.
Also so you’re aware my background is in website operations and performance. Particularly SEO and custom development with WordPress primarily.
1. Get Leads AU
Type: Small team
New agency on the block Jason Greenlees (me) from Get Leads actually comes from 20+ years of experience in the deep south of regional NSW and now offers websites with a primary focus on effective messaging that pulls at the heart strings of your prospective customers in order to promote them to action. It’s all about strategy with Get Leads and understanding the buyers journey and the different elements needed at different stages to get real results. They’ve also heavily worked in the tourism industry with various councils and tourism providers. Mila McGill is the primary designer here who works exclusively for Get Leads and also does branding work.
Get Leads works from a HQ in Kewarra Beach just up the road from Cairns in the far north of Queensland and include service in photography and videography with all websites. Plus all sites are portable and scalable built in the most common CMS in the world WordPress. Offering services from website hosting, branding and social media marketing.
Get Leads works with a variety of agencies throughout Australia from as far as Melbourne and Adelaide in the South to Sydney and Brisbane. Question to consider, “Would agencies pick another external agency to do work for them if they weren’t any good?”
Key Strength: Having a team that offers an all in-house service for customers throughout the Cairns area. 20 years of experience and over 160+ current diverse industry clients throughout Australia.
Key Disadvantage: New to Cairns, not well established, no shopfront, no actual Cairns clients in the area. Pricing is about mid range.
2. Jacob Negri
Type: Small team
An extremely good web designer who has a full range of services he targets the Cairns area and uses WordPress for all of his builds. He is a creative and has a diverse background from web design in Geelong and Melbourne. He’s got some excellent skills in Google Ads and has a big focus on TRANSPARENCY. I really like Jacob and his honest approach met up with him online within the first few weeks of me being in Cairns.
Key Advantage: Small enough to care and has a transparent approach to dealing with customers. Also runs WordPress sites.
Key Disadvantages: As a smaller freelancer/agency it’s hard to be absolutely awesome at everything. Not entirely sure what those disadvantages are looking at his site but I’m sure it’s something.
3. Mind Wire
Type: Team size hard to say
Obviously these guys have been around for a long, long time based on their site 22 years however based on what I could tell they are still running their own CMS for websites and run an old bootstrap framework for styling. Maybe that’s changed for newer sites, I didn’t hunt too much through their portfolio so I’m not 100% sure. They have a large portfolio though and variety of sites and designs some of them area really nice such as Kahler lawyers I lied and also the Moa Tours design website.
Key Advantage: These guys look like they would be great with custom requirements and specifications or apps. I was also surprised their website customers designs looked nicer than expected given their strength in the development area.
Key Disadvantage: They’re missing a few bits and pieces with their site builds such as schema and have some old frameworks floating around which I think could cost time and money. Your stuck on their system as well if you ever want to leave other than rebuilding. A great business model for the agency not so great for the customer.
4. All Corp
Type: Mid size IT team
We’re a little in awe of these guys site portfolio, clearly they have a functional or technical approach to websites even from their own website’s design. They seem to dominate the FNQ and clearly are attempting to balance their IT technical side with marketing which is actually quite admirable for IT pros. Usually IT companies are IT companies who don’t know anything about marketing but this one is a little different. I think their site is quite old so it’s hard to get a clear picture about their work with some backlink research they have a big footprint. Sites are generally heavy on stock photography from the examples on their site.
Key Advantage: Been around a long time and clearly know the tech side inside and out. Perhaps for very custom development websites they could be an option. across not only Cairns but also Townsville. If I had a brochure site which was just ticking the box maybe I’d get a quote.
Key Disadvantage: My opinion is that I’m really not a fan, again they’ve had many years experience but their site is cluttered, too much content and the text is difficult to read. Behind the scenes they appear to have some dedicated servers for clients and have a heavy focus on the technology and not necessarily on the results. They don’t have any proxy on these and are a bit old school and also still running Plesk. The CMS of choice is unknown and hosting is most likely out of Servers Australia in Sydney. Today they scored a 61/100 mobile for lighthouse benchmark which is extremely disappointing.
5. Precedence
Type: Mid size Design team
Initial reaction, nice friendly looking site and large team although I’m not sure why you’d want your web design and marketing team to appear like they work in the kitchen or in a wood shop. The image clashes with the brand and requires too much thought. From here the site doesn’t get much better the tiles for services under websites, hosting and marketing are poor stock image tiles and what coffee has to do with web hosting is beyond me. These guys have been around for a very long time and have a large supported network of website clients. Maybe that’s why their own website isn’t up to spec because they’ve been building others.
Their SEO META description on their homepage is none existent, they have their own CMS for websites rather than WordPress, Drupal or Joomla. The example site I looked at called Gathar was really nice.
Key Advantages: They’vee been around for a long time, have a huge range of clients. They also have a small shopfront in Cairns which is awesome for some clients. I do like their brand and was surprised to see performance score of 95 but of course let down in other areas like accessibility at 63/100. From their website honestly their strength is in their design and brand team here. I would use them for branding only although some things from the portfolio is a bit hit and miss maybe due to the size of the team and multiple designers.
Key Disadvantages: Not a WordPress based system. They appear to be on dedicated servers through AWS EC2 instances which tend to get a bit expensive after a while. Maybe their outsourcing their hosting to another agency as it seems a bit of a strange mix. We’re seeing good performance here due to AWS but as it’s not WordPress it’s hard to compare some elements. It was surprising that they’re running Apache on these AWS servers and not nginx or litespeed.
6. Forte Marketing
Type: Mid size Creative team
Initial reactions to this site was ‘WOW’ and they must be the leading competitor in town. I would absolutely work for them or contract to them. Design and branding is top notch here across the site and portfolio. These guys started ticking all the boxes for me on the tech side, they use Cloudflare for DNS, SEO appeared quite good other than using two h1’s on the homepage.
Performance though and lighthouse numbers at 67/100 not the worst but not good either. I decided to give them another shot from their about page just due to the video which then brought their score up to a respectable 91. Tick, they’re still awesome.
They appear to be a young team with solid skills and doing everything right in my opinion. They use WordPress and sometimes the Astra framework for sites with hosting through Kinsta.
Key Advantage: Design and Branding but their website work is also really good. Their dev side is impressive, often rare that an agency will be be good in both areas. For me these guys stood out the most in large teams. They have a shopfront in Cairns. Their socials are great but they only have a small following, perhaps this is due to not pushing marketing through this area probably because they’re already busy enough. These guys will destroy a lot of the IT type’s mentioned above over time as websites are seen more of a marketing tool and less of an IT technical thing that needs to be controlled by an IT person.
Key Disadvantage: I don’t know that they’ve been around all that long, they only have 12 Google Reviews which is a bit sad. Their backlink footprint and domain authority number are good and not overly spammy. With a bit more research I figured they appear to of launched in 2018. Personally not a huge fan of Kinsta hosting and would prefer more hosted instances across multiple providers to provide provider floating redundancy.
7. Bang Media
Type: Large size Creative team
I wrote quite a few paragraphs before deciding it was reading not great. Sorry. I wanted to concentrate mainly on what these agencies are doing right and this site is a “banger”:).
Great design, possible a webflow template hard to say. They have good lighthouse performance numbers in the 90s and reasonable Google Reviews. They also appear to have a fair size team good at photography and video and creativity.
Key Advantage: They can probably build a site more quickly than any of their competitors due to using Webflow and maybe even cheaper. They have a big team, shopfront which is good for people who like a face to face. On some of their older sites they’re using Litespeed or nginx which is good. They love video and imagery, I think I may of seen the owner/director with a camera in one of their photos so he’s definitely a creative. I can relate in this area with a passion for photography myself.
Key Disadvantage: Restricted functionality on Webflow and every site theme tends to look the same with far too much animation. From one perspective you can also appear to be locked in on the webflow platform.
They have done WordPress in the past from what I can tell with Wildlife Habitat. Some pages are missing META descriptions and a lack of alt tags. Would be interesting to note why they’ve moved and if this is a business decision on maintaining clients, creativity or efficiency.
Final decisions on who you should go with
When it comes to large teams and small marketing teams, this can also come down to what the customer wants in terms of that relationship with someone they trust. Having a large team eventually seems to break down into a lack of service, especially if the large team has a large portfolio and doesn’t scale well it’s resources.
My preference for any small or medium business would be someone more transparent in their dealings, such as Jacob or Jason from Getleads AU, compared to a Brisbane mega agencies. I do think there’s a place for both especially with media buying and other traditional media services large agencies provide. You may get better bang for buck with the smaller operators depending on your needs. Maybe even mix it up as long as the operators don’t mind working with each other given their may be some competing services. Get Leads really don’t mind working with other local creatives if you wanted the absolute best results from multiple agencies.
There’s also no real knowledge with any of these seven whether any of these agencies outsource their work. What you will find if they do is huge unnecessary delays in small changes typical from design shops who only know design and outsource the development.
With larger teams, you’re going to have a lot of diverse skill sets, including juniors, seniors, and potentially overseas workers. If your decision is based on portfolio bare in mind this could be based on a senior designers work and then you end up with someone else entirely different. When you choose a smaller team, you pretty much know what you’re getting for the most part.
If you’ve got this far and I haven’t mentioned your Cairns based website agency then you’re probably still on my radar but I didn’t want this blog to be too long. Sorry, maybe next time.
