Yes, This List Is Meant to Be Used on Us Too
A web designer writing a guide on how to vet web designers. The conflict of interest is obvious, so let's name it: we're a web studio, we sell website builds, and we'd like your business. That's exactly why this list exists. If any of these eight questions makes an agency squirm (including us), you just saved yourself a deposit.
The web design industry has no license, no board, no minimum standard. Anyone with a laptop and a Canva account can call themselves an agency by Friday. Most horror stories we hear from Sarasota business owners aren't about bad design. They're about ownership, disappearing acts, and invoices that grew a second page. All preventable with questions asked before money moved.
Ask these eight. Write the answers down. Get the important ones in the contract.
The Ownership Questions (Where People Get Trapped)
1. "Who owns the domain, the hosting account, and the code when we're done?"
The only acceptable answer is: you do. All three. The domain registered in your account, not the agency's. Hosting you can access. Code and content you can take with you.
This is the single most common trap in the industry. Some shops register your domain under their own account, and when you try to leave, your web address is a hostage. Others build on a proprietary platform you can never export from, so "leaving" means starting from zero. If the answer to this question takes more than one sentence, that's the answer.
2. "What happens if we part ways in a year?"
You want to hear something boring and specific: "We hand over all credentials and files, you keep everything, there's no exit fee." What you'll sometimes hear instead is a licensing arrangement where you were renting the site all along. Monthly "website plans" from some providers work exactly like this: cancel and the site vanishes. Renting isn't automatically wrong, but discovering you were renting is.
3. "Who actually does the work?"
Plenty of "local" agencies are one salesperson and an outsourced team the client never meets. That's not automatically bad either, but you should know before you sign, because it predicts your experience: how fast changes happen, how much gets lost in translation, whether the person who understood your business in the sales call is anywhere near the actual build.
The Process Questions (Where Projects Die)
4. "What's the real timeline, and what do you need from me to hit it?"
An honest shop gives you a range and a dependency list: a typical small-business site runs 2 to 6 weeks, and the number one cause of blown timelines is the client's own content arriving late. If someone promises a custom site in 48 hours, you're getting a template with your logo dropped in. If someone quotes four months for a 6-page site, you're funding their disorganization. We published a day-by-day breakdown of our own build process partly so clients can hold us to it.
5. "What happens after launch?"
Websites aren't finished, they're started. Software updates, security patches, backups, the "can you change our hours" emails. Ask what's included, what costs extra, and what an hourly change runs. Vague answers here are where surprise invoices are born. A clear answer sounds like a menu, not a shrug.
6. "Can I see three sites you built that are still live and still look good?"
Not a portfolio page of screenshots. Live URLs, launched a year or more ago. Screenshots show what a site looked like on its best day. Live sites show whether the work holds up, loads fast on a phone, and whether past clients stuck around. Then go one step further: call one of those businesses and ask how the project actually went. Five minutes, and almost nobody does it.
The Money Questions (Ask Before the Proposal)
7. "How will we know if this worked?"
A website is a business investment, so somebody should be measuring it like one. You want to hear specifics: calls, form fills, direction requests, bookings. If the success metric on offer is "a beautiful modern site," you're buying art, not a tool. Beautiful is table stakes. Measurable is the job.
8. "What's the total cost, including everything you haven't mentioned yet?"
Hosting, domain renewal, plugins or platform fees, stock photos, copywriting, revisions beyond round two. Legitimate costs, all of them, but they belong in the quote, not the third invoice. For context on what real numbers look like across the market, we broke down what websites actually cost, and our own builds start at $2,500 for a Foundation Build. Anyone who won't put a number in writing until you've "hopped on a quick call" three times is negotiating, not scoping.
Red Flags That Should End the Conversation
- 100% payment up front. Deposits of a third to a half are normal. The full amount before a single mockup is not.
- They can't explain their own process. If the plan is "we'll send some designs over," there is no plan.
- Pressure tactics. "This price expires Friday" is for timeshares, not websites.
- They trash your current site without asking a single question about your business. Sometimes the right answer is fixing what you have. We wrote about when a redesign beats a rebuild because pushing a full rebuild on everyone is a sales strategy, not advice.
- No contract, or a contract with no deliverables in it. A handshake scope is a future argument.
What Good Answers Sound Like
Fast, boring, and specific. That's the tell across all eight questions. Good agencies answer ownership questions in one sentence because they've never had a reason to make it complicated. They quote real ranges because they track their own projects. They show live work because it exists.
Evasive answers are also data. "That's handled in our standard agreement" means read that agreement twice. "We're more of a partner than a vendor" means the pricing is about to be creative.
Take the list, ask all eight, and compare answers across two or three shops. If you want to hear ours, ask us directly. Question 1 takes us one sentence: you own everything, day one.
The agencies worth hiring answer these questions in one sentence each. The ones to avoid answer them in paragraphs.
Frequently Asked Questions
What questions should I ask a web designer before hiring them?
The big eight: who owns the domain, hosting, and code; what happens if we part ways; who actually does the work; what's the real timeline and what do you need from me; what's included after launch; can I see three sites still live after a year or more; how will we measure success; and what's the total cost including everything not yet mentioned. Get the important answers in the contract.
Who should own the website when a design project is done?
You should, in full: the domain registered in your own account, hosting you can access, and code and content you can take with you. The most common trap in the industry is an agency registering your domain under their account or building on a proprietary platform you can't export from, which makes your web presence a hostage if you ever leave.
What are red flags when hiring a web design agency?
Demanding 100% payment up front, refusing to put a price in writing, being unable to explain their own process, pressure tactics like expiring prices, trashing your current site before asking anything about your business, and contracts with no deliverables listed. Deposits of a third to a half are normal; everything else on that list should end the conversation.
