Most bad website projects are not bad because the designer could not design. They are bad because nobody agreed what was being bought. These nine questions surface that in twenty minutes, and you can ask them of us too.
1. Who owns the domain?
The single most common disaster in this market. If your developer registers the domain in their own name, you are renting your own address, and the day you fall out you lose your email as well as your site.
The answer you want: it is registered to you, in your name, and you have the login. Not "do not worry, I handle it."
2. Where is it hosted, and whose account is it?
Same problem one layer down. Hosting in someone else's reseller account means a site you cannot move, cannot back up and cannot access if they stop answering.
3. What happens when I want to change a word?
Ask them to describe it. If the answer is "send it to me and I will do it", you have bought a dependency, not a website. Find out whether that costs money each time and how quickly they respond.
4. What am I getting when we finish?
Ask for the list out loud. It should include the site, the source files or repository, the domain and hosting credentials, and something written down explaining how to run it. We hand over the repository, a runbook and thirty days of support, and it is in the contract.
5. Can I see a site you built that is still live?
Not screenshots. Live URLs. Then open them on your phone, on mobile data, and count how long they take. A portfolio of beautiful images proves someone can design; a fast live site proves they can finish.
6. What is not included?
The most useful question on this list. Copywriting? Photography? Content upload? Stock images? Translations? An SSL certificate? Each of those is a normal thing to exclude and an abnormal thing to discover in week six.
Our scope has an explicit out-of-scope column for exactly this reason. Whoever you hire, make them write one.
7. How will I know if it is working?
If nobody sets up analytics and conversion tracking before launch, you will have no idea whether the new site is better than the old one. Verify it works before cutover, not after — otherwise you lose the baseline you needed to compare against.
8. What happens if it takes longer than planned?
Projects slip. The question is whether you find out in the same week or in the third month. Ask what the communication looks like when something goes wrong, because that is the part you will actually experience.
9. Why this price?
Not to haggle. To hear whether they can explain it. Someone who can tell you which parts of the number are design, which are build, and which are the integrations you asked for is someone who has thought about your project. Someone who produces a single figure with no structure has guessed.
If a quote cannot be broken into parts, it cannot be reduced either. You will have no way to cut scope when the budget tightens, because nobody knows what anything costs.
The ones that are genuinely red flags
Everything above has a reasonable answer. These do not:
- The domain will be in their name.
- There is no written scope, just a WhatsApp thread.
- They cannot show you a live site.
- The deposit is the full amount.
- "SEO included" with no explanation of what that means.
Ask us the same nine
We would rather lose a project on question four than have the argument in month three. If our answers do not satisfy you, they should not.