How to choose who builds your website: 7 questions to ask

Choosing who builds your website is a decision you will carry with you for years. Not so much because of the site itself, but because of everything that follows: who updates it, who answers when something breaks, who owns the access, how free you are to change your mind.

These are the questions I would ask, if I were on the other side.

1. Who owns what?

It is the most important question and almost nobody asks it. The domain must be registered in your name, not in the name of whoever builds the site. The hosting credentials must be yours. The content you paid for is yours.

It sounds obvious, but the situation where the supplier owns the domain and the company cannot move without negotiating is more common than you would think. Ask before you sign, and ask for it in writing.

2. What happens if you disappear tomorrow?

Put more politely: is the site built on standard tools, or on something only you know how to manage? A site built with widely used technologies can be picked up by another professional. A site built on a proprietary system ties you in, and sooner or later that tie has a price.

3. Who writes the content?

Many cheap quotes are cheap because you supply the content. That is a perfectly reasonable arrangement, as long as you know in advance: in my experience it is the number one cause of projects that stall. Not because the client is unwilling, but because writing the copy for your own site is harder and slower than it looks.

Always check whether the quote includes copy, photographs and graphic material, or whether it assumes they already exist.

4. Is search visibility planned from the start?

If SEO appears as an optional item to add at the end, that is the sign the structure of the site will be decided without taking it into account. It is work that has to be set up at the design stage: I have written about it in another piece.

5. What happens after launch?

A website needs updates, backups, security checks and fixes. Ask what is included, for how long, with what response times, and what it costs once the included support ends. A supplier with no ready answer on this point has probably not planned for the longest phase of the relationship.

6. Who will I actually be talking to?

In larger organisations you often speak to a salesperson while buying and to somebody else during the project — sometimes to nobody in particular. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but it changes the experience considerably. Ask who your point of contact will be, and whether it will be the same person throughout.

7. Can I see work similar to mine?

Not “a nice portfolio”: work comparable to yours in sector or in complexity. Anyone who has worked in fields where information is sensitive — healthcare, research, professional services — has learned things that cannot be improvised. You can take a look at my projects to get an idea of what I mean.

The warning signs I would watch for

The instant quote. A number given before the questions is a number made up.

Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls search engines. Anyone guaranteeing first position is promising something they cannot deliver, or will aim at searches so specific as to be useless.

A price far below everyone else’s. Usually it means something is not included, and you will find out later.

No questions about the business. If nobody asks what you sell, to whom, and why they should choose you, you are buying a piece of decoration, not a commercial tool.

A note on what you are really looking for

The need is rarely “a website”. Usually it is: to be found, to look credible, to receive better enquiries, to stop wasting time. The site is one of the means.

A professional who starts from there will ask you uncomfortable questions at the beginning and save you money later. If you want to see how I set up that conversation, I have described my method step by step.