What to ask a web designer before you pay them anything

Most people hiring a web designer have no real way of judging whether the person opposite them is any good. You cannot assess the code. You probably cannot tell a good design from a merely fashionable one. And everybody's portfolio looks fine, because everybody only puts their best four jobs in it.

So judge them on their answers instead. These are the questions I would ask, including several that would make my own life harder if every client asked them.

The most important question on the list, and the one that causes the most misery when it gets skipped.

You want the domain registered in your name, with you listed as the registrant, and access to the account it lives in. You want the content to be yours and exportable in a form somebody else could use. You want your own login to the CMS rather than shared access to theirs.

The failure mode here is rarely malice. It is usually a developer who set everything up under his own account in 2019 because it was quicker on the day, and has since stopped answering emails. Recovering a domain from a dormant company is genuinely difficult and occasionally impossible.

Everybody says yes to the first half of that question. The second half is where it gets interesting.

What you want to see is somebody logging into a real editor and changing a price or a phone number in front of you, on a site they built for somebody else. If it takes four clicks and no explanation, good. If they start explaining what a widget is and why the page builder does that, you have your answer.

This matters more than almost anything else here, because it decides whether your website is still telling the truth in three years.

Blunt, but ask it anyway. A single freelancer is a single point of failure, and most small business websites are built by single freelancers. Ours included, which is exactly why I think you should ask.

Reasonable answers: the code sits in a standard repository you can be given access to, the site is built on something other developers know, there is documentation, there is somebody who would pick it up. Unreasonable answer: a laugh and a change of subject.

Get it in writing and itemised. Hosting? Security updates? How many content edits, and what counts as one? Does it cover anything to do with Google? What is the response time when something breaks on a Saturday morning? I have written separately about what a website should cost, but the monthly figure is where most of the surprises live.

Then ask the question underneath it. What happens if I stop paying? If the answer is that the site goes offline, you are renting rather than owning. That is not automatically wrong, but the price should reflect it and you should know before you sign anything.

You do not need to understand the answer in any detail. You need to hear that there is a reason behind it.

"WordPress, because it is what I know well and it suits a site this size" is a perfectly good answer. "WordPress with about twenty plugins" is a maintenance bill you have not been told about yet. "I don't really know, my developer handles that side" from the person you are actually paying is a problem.

Follow it up by asking what happens when the platform needs updating, and specifically who does that and whether it is included.

Not the portfolio page. Three real addresses, ideally at least a year old, that you can open on your own phone while you are sitting there.

Then do two things with them. Load them on mobile data rather than wifi and count the seconds. And look for signs of life since launch: opening hours that are still right, a news page that does not stop abruptly in 2023. A designer whose older sites have all gone stale is telling you something useful about what happens after the invoice is paid.

The honest answer is: more than you expect, and earlier than you want. Text, photographs, logo files in the right formats, and a series of decisions you would rather somebody else made.

A designer who says "nothing much, leave it with me" is either going to fill your site with placeholder waffle or come back in week six asking for all of it at once. The good ones hand you a list on day one and then chase you for it.

Ask for a timeline, then ask what normally delays things. Anybody honest gives the same answer: content. Websites do not run late because designers are slow, they run late because the photographs never arrived.

What you want is somebody who tells you that at the start and builds the schedule around it, rather than promising four weeks and then quietly blaming you in week nine.

Ask for the actual number. An hourly rate, or included in the plan, or a minimum charge per job. Then picture wanting six small changes over a year and see how that feels.

This is where a cheap build becomes an expensive one, and it is the part almost nobody asks about while they are still excited about how the homepage looks.

How many years they have been trading. Some of the worst sites I have looked at were built by people who have been doing this for twenty years and stopped learning around 2014.

Whether they are local. It helps, and obviously I would say that, but it matters far less than whether they answer the phone. A responsive designer two hundred miles away beats an unresponsive one in the next village.

Which design software they use, which is of no consequence to you whatsoever. And awards, which are frequently paid for and tell you nothing about whether your phone will ring.

Two patterns are worth watching for once you have worked through all that.

The first is the answer that is technically true but built to close the conversation down. "Yes, you'll own everything" is not the same sentence as "the domain will be registered in your name and here is the account you will log into". Ask for the specific version of anything that sounds smooth.

The second is defensiveness. Reasonable people do not mind being asked who owns the domain. If a question about ownership or handover makes somebody prickly, you have learned considerably more from the reaction than you would have from the answer. Listen out too for whether they ever say "I don't know". Somebody with an instant confident answer to every question, including ones that genuinely depend on things they have not looked at yet, is performing rather than thinking.

Whatever gets agreed over coffee, get the important parts into the quote or a short contract. Not a forty page document that neither of you reads. Half a page covering what is being built, what it costs, what is not included, who owns the domain and the content, what the ongoing fee covers, and what happens if either side wants to stop.

Most of the disputes I hear about in this trade would have been prevented by that half page. It doubles as a test, too. Anybody who resists writing it down is telling you something worth hearing.

The strongest signal is not in their answers at all. It is whether they ask you anything.

Somebody who takes a brief without asking who your customers are, how people find you at the moment, what kind of work you want more of and what you would rather stop doing altogether, is going to build you a brochure rather than something that earns its keep. The first meeting should feel more like being interviewed than being sold to.

If you are collecting quotes at the moment, use this list on us as well. Get in touch, ask all of it, and if our answers do not hold up against somebody else's, go with them. A website is a five year decision and it is worth one awkward hour at the start.