Nine questions to ask a web designer
Nine plain questions that separate a company that will deliver from one that will take your money and go quiet. Each one takes about ten seconds to ask.
Written from more than 300 websites designed, built and deployed over ten years across New Zealand, Australia and Fiji. 216 of them are live right now.
Why this exists
Nobody who has been burned by a web company saw it coming. The quote seemed fine. The person seemed fine. It went wrong later, quietly, in ways that were hard to spot at the start.
If you read the public reviews of Australian web design companies, the same handful of failures come up again and again. Not bad design. Not the wrong shade of blue. Things like this:
What people actually write in the reviews
- Paid in full and waited a year for a website that never arrived
- Never given the credentials or control of their own site
- Hit with price increases from the start of the build
- Locked into the builder's hosting with no way out
- Emails and phone calls stopped being answered
Every one of those is preventable, and every one is preventable before you pay anything, by asking a question whose answer is hard to fake.
That is what this is. Nine questions, what a good answer sounds like, and the specific thing to be wary of. Use it on us too. It works the same way.
Who owns the domain name?
The domain is the one thing in this arrangement you cannot rebuild. Your website can be redone. Your logo can be redrawn. If someone else holds the registration, they hold your website, your email, and the address on every sign, van and business card you own.
This is the most common way a routine disagreement turns into an expensive one. It is also the easiest to check.
"It is registered in your name, or your company's. I will send you the login today so you can see it."
"We look after all that for you." "It is under our account, it is easier that way." "We can transfer it at the end."
Check it yourself. Search your domain on any public WHOIS lookup. The registrant should be you or your business, not your web company. Thirty seconds, costs nothing.
When do I get the logins?
Not just the website. Domain registrar, hosting, content system, Google Business Profile, analytics. Every account that exists because of this project.
The answer tells you what happens on the worst day of the relationship rather than the best one. A company confident in its work hands over access early, because it does not expect you to want to leave.
"As each account is created, before we start building. You will have them the whole way through."
"At handover." "Once the final invoice is settled." Anything that ties access to money still owed.
Am I locked into your hosting?
Hosting is cheap. A small business site costs a few dollars a month to run. When hosting is bundled into a compulsory ongoing fee with no way out, you are not paying for hosting. You are paying for the fact that leaving is difficult.
Ongoing support is worth paying for. Being unable to take your own site elsewhere is not the same thing.
"Host it wherever you like. If you ever leave, we export the site and hand it over."
A mandatory monthly fee with no stated exit, or a site built so it only runs on their platform.
What is the total price, and what makes it go up?
The second half of that question is the one that matters. Almost nobody is quoted a price and then charged something different by surprise. What happens is that the scope quietly grows, each addition is individually reasonable, and the final number is nothing like the first one.
Ask for the list of things that count as extra, in writing, before you agree. A company that has done this many times produces that list immediately, because it is always the same list.
A fixed number, a written scope, and a named list of what falls outside it with what each costs.
"It depends." An hourly rate with no cap. A headline price noticeably below everyone else's.
What happens if it is late?
Websites run late. That is normal and usually forgivable. What is not normal is a project with no date attached at all, because a project with no date cannot be late, and therefore never is.
You are not looking for a penalty clause. You are looking for whether a specific date exists in writing and whether anything happens when it passes.
A date in the proposal, a named reason it might move, and a weekly update so you see it coming.
"A few weeks." "As soon as we get your content." No date at all, or a date nobody mentions again.
Can I see it before I pay?
This is the one that does the most work, because everything else on this list is a promise about the future and this is not.
A portfolio shows you what someone did for another business. It tells you very little about what they will do for yours, and it is the easiest thing in this industry to borrow. Seeing a real version of your site, with your business in it, answers the question completely.
Plenty of good companies will not do this, and that is a fair commercial position rather than a red flag. But if one will, you have removed nearly all of your risk before any money changes hands.
"Here is a first version of your homepage. Have a look, then decide."
"Here is our portfolio." "We start once the deposit clears." Both may be fine. Neither shows you anything about your own site.
Who writes the words?
Here is the real reason websites take a year.
In most stalled projects the web company is not the one holding things up. They are waiting on the business owner for copy, photos and approvals, and the business owner is running a business. The homework sits in an inbox. Three weeks become three months. Everyone ends up frustrated and each side thinks it is the other's fault.
Find out at the start whose job the words are. If the answer is yours, be honest with yourself about when you will actually do it.
"We write it. You read it and tell us what is wrong. One conversation, then we handle it."
"Just send us your content." "We will need your copy for each page." That is a project waiting on you.
How will you prove it works on a phone?
Most of the people who look at your website are holding a phone, often outdoors, often on a patchy connection, often while deciding between you and someone else. "It is responsive" is a word, not a test.
There is a real, public standard to ask about. Google publishes a free tool called PageSpeed Insights, and one of the numbers it reports is how long the main content takes to appear. Google's own threshold for good is 2.5 seconds on mobile. Anyone can run it on any website, including yours.
"We will run PageSpeed Insights before launch and show you the score. And we will open it on your phone together."
"It is fully responsive." A demo shown only on a large laptop screen.
Check it yourself. Search for PageSpeed Insights, enter your current website address, look at the mobile score. Free, takes a minute. A poor score is not a reason to panic, but it is a reason to ask.
Will it be found by Google, and by AI?
This is the new one, and most web companies are not yet being asked it.
A growing number of people no longer search and scroll through blue links. They ask ChatGPT, or Google's AI summary, or Perplexity, for a recommendation and act on the answer. Those systems can only recommend a business whose website they can read and understand well enough to name it.
Most small business websites cannot be read that way. Not because they are badly designed, but because they are missing the underlying structure those systems rely on. That structure is not expensive to add. It is just rarely done, because until recently there was no reason to.
Specifics: schema markup, a clean heading structure, an llms.txt file, your Google Business Profile properly connected.
"We do SEO" with nothing behind it. Or a monthly SEO fee that starts before the site is even built.
Check it yourself, tonight. Open ChatGPT and ask who it recommends for your trade in your suburb. If a competitor comes up and you do not, that is worth knowing. It is not a ranking problem and it usually is not your fault.
If you only do one thing
Ask question six. Can I see it before I pay?
It is the only question here whose answer you can verify immediately rather than take on trust, and it makes the others much less frightening. If someone will show you a real version of your own site before you have spent anything, you are not relying on their promises about domains, dates or invoices. You are looking at the work.
That is what we do, so it is only fair to say so plainly.
We will build you a first version of your homepage, free, on one of our templates with your business in it, and send it over with an honest note on how you currently show up in Google and in AI search. Both are yours to keep whether you work with us or not.
If you like the direction, the full custom design is the part we quote on. If you do not, you have lost nothing but the two minutes it took to tell us your website address.
Talk to us →This guide is general information for business owners, not legal or financial advice. Use it on any web company you are considering, including us.