A small studio in Christchurch
One clear idea: proper websites, built once and handed over outright.
Proper websites, handed over outright
Freehold builds proper websites for small organisations and businesses across Aotearoa and hands each one over outright. One flat price, nothing monthly, yours to keep and move any time. That’s the whole studio in a sentence.
There’s no dashboard and no account. You email us what you want, we build it and host it, and when you need a change you email again. The studio runs on a lot of automation, and everything important crosses Jamie’s desk.
The price is published rather than quoted, and it holds up against the field: what a website really costs in New Zealand. Why there is nothing monthly: a website with no monthly fees. The question under both: owning vs renting your website.
Worst-day readability, every time
Four ideas sit behind every site we build. They come straight from the support room.
Built for the worst day
The reader might be newly diagnosed, exhausted, or scared. Large text, high contrast and room to breathe are the baseline, not the extra.
One decision at a time
Each part of a page asks for a single clear action. No wall of choices, no hunting through menus.
Calm, not urgent
No flashing offers, no pressure, no clutter. A website should feel like a steady hand.
Your real content, carried across
Your history, your people, your funders, your stories. Nothing important gets dropped in the rebuild.
The person behind the studio
Jamie
Designer · Christchurch
“The website has to work on someone’s hardest day. That’s the only standard I care about.”
A designer with a support-work background
Freehold is run by Jamie, a designer in Christchurch, after years of frontline community and disability-sector support work. That’s where the whole approach comes from: the reader on their hardest day, on a phone, needing one clear next step.
In support work the goal was always for people to end up more capable and less reliant on anyone. The studio is built the same way. You own the site outright, you can walk away with it any time, and nothing about it ties you down.
Examples, shared with care
Every rebuild starts as a private preview for the organisation it was built for, and many carry photos of real people, published for their own audience. So we don’t show those previews here. It wouldn’t be fair to the people in them.
We share examples once a group has agreed to be shown, and only in the way they’re comfortable with. Ask, and we’ll send what we can, privately.
Email us any time
If you run a small organisation or business in Aotearoa and any of this sounds like what you need, flick us an email. There’s never a cost to ask, and never any pressure to go ahead.