Choosing who builds your website is a bigger decision than it looks. The wrong choice costs more than the fee: months of waiting, a site that never launches, or a site that launches and brings nobody.
You can see how we work in our case studies.
The two problems I hear about most
When clients come to us after working with someone else, their stories are usually one of two:
- The project was never finished. The developer started, it dragged on for months, communication slowed, and the site was never completed.
- The site was finished but useless. It looked fine, but it brought no enquiries. It wasn’t connected to a Google Business Profile, search engines couldn’t properly read it, and it couldn’t be used for marketing. It was just online.
Most of the advice below is about avoiding those two outcomes.
Get clear on what the site must do
Before you talk to anyone, decide the main job of the website. For most service businesses, it’s marketing: being found by people searching for what you do, and turning them into calls and WhatsApp messages. If the designer only talks about colours and animations, they’re solving a different problem.
Questions to ask any web designer
- What’s the timeline, and what happens if it runs late?
- How many rounds of changes are included after the first draft?
- Will I own the website code and the domain once it’s paid for? Is that written in the agreement?
- Will each service have its own page?
- Do you set up Google Search Console, Bing, a sitemap and structured data?
- Will you connect the site to my Google Business Profile?
- Can I see live sites you’ve built, and do any of them bring their owners enquiries from Google or ChatGPT?
- Who will I actually talk to during the project?
Red flags
- No written agreement, or an agreement that doesn’t say who owns the site.
- Full payment upfront with no milestones.
- No live examples, only screenshots or mock-ups.
- Vague timelines like “very soon”.
- Promises of the number 1 position on Google.
- The domain registered in their name, not yours.
- No mention of search engines at all.
A good quote versus a cheap quote
A good quote lists the pages, what’s included, the timeline, the number of revisions, what happens after launch and what you’ll pay each year. A cheap quote is usually short because it leaves those things out.
How to check reviews
Look for reviews on Google with real names, and check that the work they mention actually exists online. Open the sites in a portfolio and test them on your phone. Ask to speak to one or two past clients.
How we handle these
At Elevate, you get a fixed price before work starts, a deposit and balance tied to milestones, a preview link to review the full site before it goes live, and ownership of your site and domain once it’s paid for, written into our agreement. A detailed site usually takes one to two weeks including changes.
When you’re ready, compare our website design service and fixed prices.
Want a free check of your website?
Send us your website. We’ll check whether Google and ChatGPT can find and read it, and tell you what to fix.