What to ask when hiring a web designer (or developer)

Small businesses get burned when they hire on aesthetics alone. A beautiful Figma file is not a fast site, a findable site, or a site you can update without calling the agency for every comma. These are the questions we wish more clients asked upfront.

Questions to ask before you hire

• Who owns the code, domain, and design files when the project ends?
• What is included after launch — bug fixes, content updates, security patches, hosting?
• Will the site ship with SEO basics: titles, descriptions, sitemap, crawlable HTML, performance?
• What analytics will be installed, and will you have access to the accounts?
• Can you show live sites you built — similar industry or complexity — not only redesign concepts?
• What is the realistic timeline, and what do you need from us each week?
• How do you handle revisions — fixed rounds or hourly creep?
• If we need ecommerce, booking, or a login later, is the architecture ready for that?

How to find a good fit for a small business

Look for a team that asks about your customers and how leads arrive — not only brand colours. Good studios push back on scope: they would rather lose a bad-fit project than ship something unmaintainable. Red flags: no maintenance offer, no mention of mobile performance, portfolio full of one-page concepts with no live URLs, and quotes that do not itemise deliverables.

Affordable does not mean cheapest. It means the right scope for your stage: a solid marketing site you can grow, built by people who will still answer email after launch.