Choosing a web designer — the questions to ask, and five answers that should worry you

Trust7 September 202613 min read

Short answer: ask twelve questions, and judge the answers rather than the work. Anyone can show you a handsome portfolio. What separates a supplier you will still be glad of in two years is whether they will answer awkward commercial questions — who owns the domain, what the monthly buys, what the total first-year cost is, what is deliberately excluded — plainly and without hedging. Every one of those is a business question, not a technical one, so you are already qualified to assess it. And there are five specific answers that should end the conversation.

Why the questions beat the portfolio

A portfolio tells you what a designer can make look good. It tells you nothing about what happens when you want to change the phone number in eighteen months, or when they stop answering emails, or when you decide to move. Those are the things that actually cost trade businesses money, and they are all settled — or not settled — in the conversation before you sign.

None of what follows requires you to understand how a website is built. Ask the question, listen to whether the answer is specific, and notice whether they had to go and find out. Twelve questions, each with the shape of a good answer and the shape of a bad one.

The twelve questions

1. Whose name goes on the domain?

Good: “Yours, registered to your business with your email address on the record.” Bad: “We handle all that for you,” which is not an answer to the question that was asked. This one is short here because it deserves a whole article, and has one: who actually owns your website walks through how to check the registrant yourself in about a minute, and what your rights are if the answer is wrong.

2. Can I have a copy of the site?

Good: “Yes — ask any time and we will send you the files,” or an honest “no, because it is built inside a platform, so what you would be taking is the content rather than the site.” Both are acceptable if said up front. Bad: “Why would you need that?” The answer to that is: because one day I might, and I would like to know now rather than then. The difference between a portable site and a platform-locked one is argued in full in website builders versus a built site.

3. What exactly is the monthly for, and can I cancel it separately?

Good: an itemised list — hosting, the security certificate, backups, updates, a stated number of content changes — and a clear statement of what happens to the site if you stop paying. Bad: “It covers everything,” or a monthly that bundles the domain registration in such a way that cancelling the service also loses you the address. Hosting is genuinely a recurring cost. Most of what gets added to it is a service you are choosing to buy, and what a care plan really pays for sets out which is which.

4. What happens if you stop trading?

Ask it politely and ask it anyway; small web firms close all the time and it is not an insult to plan for it. Good: “The domain is yours, the hosting account can be transferred or is already in your name, and here is where a copy of the site lives.” Bad: awkwardness, or a reassurance that they have no intention of closing — which is not the same as an answer, and is what everyone says right up until they close.

5. Who writes the words?

This is the question that ambushes more trade website projects than any other. A great many builds stall for months because the design was finished and the client was supposed to supply the text. Good: “We write it from a conversation with you and you approve it,” or “you write it and here is the brief and word count for each page.” Either is fine. Bad: silence on the subject in the quote — because that means you are writing it, and you do not know that yet.

6. Who owns the photographs?

Good: “Your own job photos are yours; any stock images are licensed for this site and here is what the licence covers; if we commission a photographer, this is the licence you get.” Bad: a shrug. Photographs are the part of a trade website doing the most persuading, and a licence limited to one site is a real constraint the day you want to use the same image in a brochure or on a van. Keep your own copies of your own job photographs somewhere that is not the website.

7. What does a revision round actually mean?

Nearly every quote says something like “three rounds of revisions” and almost nobody defines it. Good: “A round is one consolidated set of changes from you, and here is roughly what counts as a change versus a new page.” Bad: “Three revisions,” unqualified — because you will then discover that three separate emails on the same afternoon consumed all three. Ask what happens after the rounds run out, and what the hourly or per-change rate is at that point.

8. What is the total first-year cost, including everything?

One number, in writing, covering the build fee, twelve months of whatever the recurring charge is, the domain, and anything else. Then ask for the same figure for year three. Good: the numbers arrive by email that afternoon. Bad: a headline build price with the recurring cost mentioned verbally, or an answer that depends on things nobody will commit to. The bands a trade site realistically falls into are set out in what a tradesman’s website should cost, which is worth reading before you take the first quote as a benchmark.

9. Can I speak to the person who will actually build it?

Good: yes, or an honest “no, but you will deal with one named person throughout and here is who.” Bad: a salesperson who cannot answer a single specific question about how anything will work, and keeps promising to check. You are not being difficult. You are establishing whether the person selling this knows what is being sold.

10. What is not included?

The most useful question on the list, and the one almost nobody asks. Any honest supplier can rattle off exclusions immediately — because they have thought about scope. Good: a real list: copywriting beyond X, photography, extra pages beyond the stated count, ongoing SEO work, email hosting, e-commerce. Bad: “everything you need is included”, which is either untrue or means the scope has not been defined and will be argued about later. What a genuinely fixed low-end scope contains and excludes is itemised in what a £700 website includes.

11. How do changes work after launch?

Trade businesses change more than they expect: a new service, a new number, a certificate that expired, a price that moved. Good: a stated turnaround and a stated cost — “small text changes within two working days, included” or “£X an hour, usually within a week.” Bad: “just drop us a line any time,” which sounds generous and means there is no agreed response time, no agreed price, and nothing to hold anybody to when it takes a month.

12. What do you promise about search?

The right answer is a modest one. Good: “We will build it so Google can crawl and index it, submit a sitemap, and set the pages up around what people actually search. We cannot promise positions.” Bad: any sentence containing a guaranteed ranking.

You do not have to take our word for this. Google’s own guidance on whether you need an SEO states that no one can guarantee a number one ranking on Google, and tells you to beware of anyone who claims to guarantee rankings, alleges a special relationship with Google, or advertises a priority submit. The same page says that if an SEO guarantees their changes will give you first place in search results, find someone else. It also notes that advertising with Google has no effect on your presence in organic results, that Google never accepts money to include or rank sites, and that it costs nothing to appear in organic results at all. Anyone selling you a paid route into the index is selling something that does not exist.

That same Google page is a useful crib sheet in its own right — it suggests asking a prospective supplier what results they expect and in what timeframe, how they measure success, what their experience is in your industry and your area, how they will communicate with you, and whether they will share every change they make and the reasoning behind it. It also gives one piece of specific practical advice worth following: if someone offers you an audit, grant them read access to Search Console at that stage, not write access. Those are Google’s questions, not ours, and they travel well beyond SEO.

Five answers that should worry you

Not red flags in the vague sense. Five specific sentences, each of which tells you something concrete about how the arrangement will go.

• “We guarantee page one.” Google says nobody can. Either the supplier does not know that, or they know and said it anyway. Neither is a good start, and both predict how the rest of the relationship will be described to you.
• “Don’t worry about the domain, we look after all that.” The question was whose name is on it. An answer that avoids the question is an answer.
• “It’s only £X a month” — with no build fee and no stated term. Free builds are not free; the cost has been moved into a recurring charge you will pay indefinitely, and often the site stops working the day you stop paying. Ask for the three-year total and watch what happens.
• “We’ll sort the content later.” Content is the project. Left unassigned, it becomes your unpaid job, the launch slips by months, and the site goes live half-finished with placeholder text nobody ever replaces.
• An itemised quote you cannot get in writing. If the scope, the exclusions and the total cost only exist as things that were said on the phone, then there is no scope. Every disagreement afterwards is your word against theirs, and you will be the one who cannot prove anything.

The honest counter-argument

Everything above reads as an argument for buying from someone professional and structured. It is not, quite, and it would be dishonest to let it stand as one.

A cheap local one-man band is often exactly the right choice. For a sole trader with four pages and a phone number, the bloke in the next village who builds sites for a few hundred pounds may deliver something perfectly good, quickly, and answer his phone for the next decade because he lives there. Rigid process and a proper contract are worth something, but they are not worth more than the thing working. Plenty of trade businesses have been well served for years by an arrangement that would fail every test on this page — and the test that matters is whether the site does its job, not whether the paperwork is impressive.

And a big agency is not automatically safer. Size buys continuity if the individual leaves, and that is real. It also buys account managers between you and whoever does the work, minimum retainers, change-request forms, and a strong chance that a small trade client is the least interesting thing on anyone’s desk that month. Failure looks different at each size: the freelancer disappears, the agency stops caring. Ask each one directly how their particular failure mode is handled, and prefer whichever answer is more specific.

The real dividing line is not size or price. It is whether the person opposite you answers commercial questions in commercial language. If they do, most of the rest is recoverable. If they do not, the price will not save you.

One last thing to check afterwards

Whoever you choose, verify the domain in Google Search Console yourself, in your own account, once the site is live — not because you will use it much, but because you should be the one holding it. It also settles the argument that follows every launch, when the site is not appearing in searches and nobody can agree whether something is broken. The diagnosis order is in why a new website is not showing up on Google, and it is usually less alarming than it feels.

Where we stand on this

F12 exists because the answers above are boring and most trade businesses cannot get them. So we publish ours before anyone asks. The prices are on the pricing section in full — £700 then £65 a month for a sole trader up to five pages, £1,500 then £145 for a small firm up to ten, £3,000 then £295 for an established firm up to twenty pages with three revision rounds, all excluding VAT. The build fee is paid up front, the monthly starts by direct debit at go-live, and the domain is registered in your name. We also build the site before the sales call, from public information, so you are looking at the finished thing rather than a mock-up and a promise. What we work on and who it suits is set out in our Kent trade websites page, and if you want an outside view of whether you need a new site at all, the Growth Diagnostic takes five questions.

The limit, stated plainly: we cannot promise you rankings, traffic or enquiries, and we will not. We are also a new company with no trading history to point at, which is a real reason to be careful with us and not only with everyone else. Ask us the twelve questions. If any answer is worse than one you get elsewhere, use the other firm.

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