How to Choose a Web Designer

What you are actually buying

Most small businesses think they are buying a design. They are buying a working system: pages that load quickly on a phone, a way for customers to contact or buy, content that explains the business, something that appears in search, and an arrangement for keeping all of that running afterwards.

That matters because it changes who is a good fit. A designer who produces a beautiful layout and hands over a site with no way to edit it, no analytics, no backups and a contact form that fails silently has delivered the picture and not the system. The picture is the part clients look at and the system is the part that earns money.

Who you can hire

None of these is better in general. What matters is matching the option to how much the site has to do and how much of it you want to own afterwards.

Decide these before you talk to anyone

1. What the site must achieve. In business terms, not design terms. Enquiries, bookings, sales, credibility for a specific audience.
2. Who it is for. The customer you actually want more of, not everyone.
3. What it must contain. The pages you know you need, and anything essential such as booking, payments, a members area or multiple languages.
4. Who owns the content. Text, photographs, logos. If you have none of it, say so now, because it changes the quote and the timeline.
5. Your budget range. Withholding it wastes everyone’s time and produces quotes that describe different projects.
6. When you need it live, and whether that date is real or aspirational.
7. Who decides. One person signs off. Committees are why web projects run long.

Two pages covering those is a brief. Send the same one to everybody and the quotes become comparable, which is the single biggest improvement you can make to this process.

What a two page brief actually contains

Most people stall at writing the brief because it sounds like a formal document. It is not. It is the answers you would give in the first meeting, written down once so you do not give three slightly different versions to three designers.

That is enough for a designer to quote accurately and for you to compare three quotes on the same basis. Spending an hour on it is the highest return hour in the entire project, and the people who skip it are the ones who later feel that everyone quoted for something different, because everyone did.

Building a shortlist

Three candidates is enough. Five is a research project. Find them the way you would find any supplier: ask businesses like yours who built their site, look at the sites of businesses you admire locally and find the credit, and search for people who work with your industry.

Weight local knowledge appropriately. It matters for a business whose customers are local, because a designer who knows the area understands the market and can be met in person. It matters very little for a business selling nationally, where the right specialist may be anywhere.

How to read a portfolio

A portfolio page is a set of claims. Turn it into evidence by opening the actual sites, and do it on a phone, because that is where most of their visitors are.

Our guide to checking a site on mobile gives you the ten minute version of that inspection, and it applies just as well to somebody else’s work as to your own.

Questions that reveal competence

Most questions get the same reassuring answer from everyone. These do not.

Reading a quote

A quote should tell you what is included, what is excluded, what it costs, when payments fall due and what happens if something changes. Most small business web quotes are a number and a paragraph, which is why comparing them is so frustrating.

Ask for the exclusions specifically, because that is where the difference between two quotes usually lives. Content writing, photography, the number of pages, ecommerce setup, email setup, migration of an old site, redirects, training, and post launch support are all commonly assumed by the client and excluded by the designer. None of that makes a quote dishonest. It makes it incomplete, and an incomplete quote becomes a series of awkward conversations later.

Why prices vary so much

The same brief can attract quotes that differ by a factor of ten, and the spread is real rather than a negotiation game. At the low end you are typically buying a template, lightly adjusted, with your content pasted in and nothing else. At the high end you are buying research, custom design, custom development, content work, testing and ongoing responsibility.

Neither is wrong. A simple business with a clear offer may be well served by the first. A business whose website is its main sales channel usually is not. What matters is knowing which one a quote describes, which you find out by asking what is included rather than by looking at the number. We set out the real cost components in our guide to the true cost of a business website.

Ownership: domain, hosting, accounts

This is the part that causes the most damage and gets the least attention, because it only matters at the moment the relationship ends.

A designer who resists this is telling you something useful. A domain registered inside a supplier’s account is the single most common reason a small business cannot move its website, and the conversation to fix it always happens at the worst possible time.

What a good process looks like

1. Discovery. A conversation about the business, the customer and what the site must achieve. Short, but skipping it is why sites look nice and sell nothing.
2. Structure. The pages and how they connect, agreed before any design. Cheap to change now, expensive later.
3. Content. Text and images gathered or written. The stage that delays most projects, so it belongs early.
4. Design. One or two key pages designed and approved, then the rest built to match.
5. Build. The site assembled, usually on a staging address you can see.
6. Review and test. You check content and links, they check speed, mobile, forms and search basics.
7. Launch and handover. Going live with redirects if you are replacing a site, plus logins, training and documentation.

The details vary and the shape should not. If a proposal has no stages, no dates and no points where you approve something, the project has no structure, and structure is what keeps a small project from drifting for six months.

Who writes the content

Content is where web projects go to die. The design is finished, the build is waiting, and everyone is waiting for the client to write the About page.

Settle it in the quote. Either you write it, and you commit to dates, or they write it, and the price includes interviewing you properly, or you compromise: you provide rough material and they edit it into shape. The third is what most small businesses should choose, because the expertise has to come from inside the business and the writing does not.

Photography is the same question. Real photographs of your premises, your team and your work outperform stock images, and if you have none, decide who is arranging them before the timeline is agreed rather than after it slips.

Realistic timelines

A straightforward small business site is usually a few weeks of work spread over a longer calendar period, because the calendar includes waiting for you. Anyone promising a complex site next week is either using a template with your logo dropped on it or has not understood the brief.

Ask what the plan assumes about your response times, because that is the hidden dependency. A schedule that requires feedback within two days from someone who is running a business full time will slip, and the slippage will be blamed on whoever is less organised. Agree a realistic cadence at the start, and put the review dates in your own calendar.

What happens after launch

A website is not a finished object. Software updates arrive, plugins break, security patches matter, content goes stale, and something always needs fixing in the first month.

Our guide to what a managed website service covers sets out what that work actually involves, whoever ends up doing it.

What the agreement should cover

For most small projects this is two or three pages, not a legal document. Its purpose is that both sides have written down the same expectations, which is where almost every web project dispute actually begins.

Privacy, accessibility and the legal bits

Ask who is responsible for the parts of the site that carry obligations rather than pixels. If the site collects any personal information, including through a contact form or analytics, it needs a privacy policy that reflects what you actually do, and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner publishes guidance for businesses at priv.gc.ca.

Accessibility is the other one. Any competent designer can build accessible pages, and many do not unless asked, so ask. It widens your audience, it overlaps almost entirely with good mobile design, and retrofitting it later costs far more than including it. Our guide to accessibility standards covers what to check.

Search and what a designer can honestly promise

A good designer sets up the foundations: page titles and descriptions, clean structure and URLs, fast loading, a sitemap, and a verified Search Console account in your name. That is the part that belongs in a build.

What nobody can honestly promise is a position in search results. Rankings depend on competition, content and links over time, none of which a launch controls. Treat a guaranteed first page claim as a reason to stop the conversation, and expect instead a clear statement of what the build includes and what would need ongoing work afterwards.

If you already have a site and a designer you have outgrown

Replacing a supplier is a different exercise from hiring one for the first time, and the risk sits in the handover rather than the build.

1. Find out what you control. Log in to the registrar, the hosting and the site. If you cannot, that is the first job, and it is easier while the relationship is still civil.
2. Take a full backup, files and database, and keep a copy somewhere the old supplier cannot reach.
3. Export what matters. Content, images, analytics history and any customer data, in a format you can use.
4. Record every URL. The new site will need redirects, and the list is much easier to gather before anything moves.
5. Check what is on annual licences, and whose card they are on. This is where surprise expiry dates come from.
6. End it cleanly. Pay what is owed, ask for the handover in writing, and thank them. The sector is small and a bad exit follows you.

Then brief the new designer on what exists rather than asking for a fresh start, because a rebuild that ignores the old site’s URLs and search history throws away visibility you already paid for. Our launch checklist covers the redirect mapping in detail.

Red flags

The cheapest option, and what it costs later

Cheap is a legitimate choice when the site is genuinely simple and the business is starting out. What turns it into an expensive choice is what usually comes bundled with it: no ownership, no documentation, no maintenance, and a builder who is unreachable within a year.

The pattern we see repeatedly is a business that pays a small amount for a site, cannot edit it, cannot find the person who built it, does not control the domain, and eventually pays several times the original price to rebuild from nothing. If you are going to spend at the low end, spend it where ownership and access are clear, and accept a simpler site rather than a cheaper arrangement.

“The expensive part of a cheap website is never the website. It is not being able to leave it.”

Mistakes that make this expensive

One last piece of advice that applies whoever you hire. Keep your own file of everything that matters: the registrar login, the hosting details, the site administrator account, the analytics access, a copy of the final invoice and the written scope. Put it somewhere the business controls rather than in one person’s inbox. Every difficult website situation we are asked to untangle begins with nobody being able to find one of those six things, and every one of them takes minutes to save at the time.

It is also worth agreeing how you will work together week to week before the project starts. One channel for decisions, whether that is email or a shared document, so nothing important lives only in a phone call. A named day for feedback, so neither side is waiting. And a rule that changes to scope go in writing with any effect on price and timeline stated at the time rather than settled at the end. None of that is bureaucracy on a small project. It is the difference between a build that finishes and one that quietly drifts into its fourth month while both sides privately blame the other.

Frequently asked questions