How to choose a web designer

The questions that actually separate people

Everyone has a nice portfolio. Portfolios are the easiest thing in this industry to make look good, because you only show the ones that went well. These questions are harder to fake:

• "Who owns the website, the domain and the hosting account when it is finished?" The answer should be: you. If there is any hesitation, walk away.
• "Can I see a site you built three years ago?" New sites all look fine. A three-year-old site shows whether it was built to last and whether the client stayed.
• "What happens if I want to leave?" A good answer is that they will help you migrate. A bad answer is a long pause.
• "What will this cost me per month afterwards, in total?" Get the full number, including hosting, maintenance, licences and anything else.
• "Explain to me why my current site is slow." If the answer is jargon with no plain-English translation, that is how the whole project will go.

Answers that should worry you

Not necessarily dealbreakers, but worth pushing on:

• "We guarantee page one on Google." Nobody can. Google does not sell guaranteed positions.
• "You do not need to worry about the technical side." You do not need to understand it, but you should be told what it is.
• "The website stays in our account." Then it is not your website.
• "We will need to redirect your domain to us." Your domain should stay in your name, registered to you.
• "SEO is included, do not worry about it." Ask what specifically. "SEO included" without a list means nothing.

Local, national, or freelance?

A local designer can come and photograph your premises, meet you, and be held accountable at the school gates. That matters more than people expect, particularly for trades and businesses that sell on trust.

A national agency may have more specialist skills and deeper resources, which matters if your project is genuinely complex. You will pay for the overheads and you are unlikely to meet the people doing the work.

A freelancer is usually the cheapest and can be excellent. The risk is capacity: one person with a family emergency is a stalled project, and one person who stops trading is a website nobody can update.

None of these is right in the abstract. What matters is that whichever you choose, you finish owning everything.

Judging a portfolio properly

Do not just look at whether the sites are attractive. Open two or three of them on your phone, on mobile data rather than wifi, and see how they feel. Then check:

• How fast does it become usable? Count the seconds.
• Is the phone number obvious without scrolling?
• Does it read like a human wrote it, or like a template?
• Search Google for the business name plus their town — do they actually rank?
• Are the businesses still trading, and still using the site?