How to choose a web designer for a local business

A plain checklist for hiring the person who builds your site, from a studio that keeps getting called in to fix what the last one left behind.

Ask who owns the site when it is done

This is the question that trips up the most owners, and it almost never comes up until it is too late. Plenty of designers build your site on their own account, or inside a platform where the pages really belong to the company that made the tool. Stop paying, or have a falling out, and the whole thing can go dark overnight. Your hours, your photos, the reviews people left you, gone with it.

So ask it flat out before you hire anyone. When this is finished, do I own the site and the files? If the answer wanders, keep looking. You paid for it, so it should be yours, with the code handed over and hosting that has your name on the bill. Owning what you paid for is the floor, not a favor.

Get the whole price before work starts

A real quote is a number, not a mood. Watch for the designer who comes in low, then bills by the hour once you are committed, so every small edit turns into another invoice and the figure you shook hands on stops meaning much.

Ask what the finished site costs, from the first call to launch, and what a new page costs you a year from now. We price our builds flat on purpose: $2,000 for a standard site, $4,000 for a larger one, and stores from $5,500. You know the number before we touch a keyboard. That's not a gimmick. It's just how you treat someone whose money you want.

Make sure you can leave

Good work doesn't need a cage around it. Some builders lock you into a platform you cannot export from, so the only way to keep your own website is to keep paying them, month after month, with no end to it. It looks fine at first, because the site is up and the pages load.

Ask a simple thing. If we part ways next year, can I take the site and my files with me? The answer should be yes without a pause. No fee just to keep the lights on, no scramble to rebuild from scratch. A site you cannot leave was never really yours.

Find out if a person actually answers

Your site will break at some point. A form stops sending, or a phone number needs changing, or something looks off after a browser update. When that day comes, you want a person, not a ticket sitting in a queue that answers in four or five business days.

A lot of shops hand your project to someone three time zones away who has never spoken to you. Ask how support works and who picks up. If you cannot get a name and a number you can actually call, that tells you how the whole year will feel. The good ones just say it plainly: this is who you reach, and here is the number.

Look at real sites, and see if they load

Pretty pictures in a portfolio are easy to fake. Ask for links to sites that are live right now, then open them on your own phone. Do they load fast? Can you find the phone number in a couple of seconds? Fill out the contact form and see if a message actually reaches you.

A designer who hand-codes clean pages will have sites that feel quick and get out of the way. One who leans on heavy page builders and stock templates will have sites that drag, especially on a weak signal in a parking lot, which is exactly where your customer is standing when they pull you up.

What good looks like

Put it together and the list is short. You own the site and the code. The price is a real number you agreed to up front. You can walk away and take your files with you. A person answers when something breaks. And the sites they show you actually load and work on a phone, not just on the big screen back in their studio.

That is the bar we hold ourselves to. We're Tony and Dani, a husband-and-wife studio in Westerly, and we hand-code sites for businesses around Rhode Island and the Connecticut shoreline. If you want to see where your current site is quietly losing customers, there is a free scan on ours that runs in a few seconds. And when you are ready to see how we work and what it costs, our custom websites page lays it out plainly.

Thinking about a new site? See our custom websites page and our flat pricing.