Questions to Ask a Web Designer Before You Sign Anything

A managing partner in Burnaby has three web design proposals open in three browser tabs. All three promise a responsive site, good SEO and an on-time launch. She can’t tell them apart, so she’s leaning toward the cheapest. The right questions to ask a web designer would split them in ten minutes: who does the work, what the price covers, who owns the site at the end, and what happens when the contact form breaks in month four.

I’m Joshua Jackai. I run Jackai Agency, a web design practice in Vancouver, and I’m usually the one answering these questions for B2B firms, professional-service practices and local retailers. This post lists the questions to ask a web designer before you sign, what a good answer sounds like, and the answers that should send you to the next proposal. It works the same whether you’re talking to a freelancer or a web design agency.

Why do the questions to ask a web designer matter more than the portfolio?

A portfolio is a highlight reel. It shows finished pages from their best angle. It doesn’t show who built them, whether the client could edit them a year later, or whether the project ran two months late.

Looks matter, which is why a portfolio can mislead you. In three studies, people rated the visual appeal of homepages shown for half a second. In the third, some saw each page for just 50 milliseconds, and their ratings closely matched the half-second ones (Lindgaard et al., 2006). A portfolio is built to win that first glance.

Design shapes trust, too. When 2,684 people judged the credibility of live websites, the “design look” came up in 46.1% of their comments, more than any other factor (Fogg et al., 2003). So a polished portfolio proves the designer can earn a good first impression for you. It proves nothing about price or ownership, and nothing at all about support.

That’s the gap your questions fill. This isn’t a test of taste. It’s a test of terms. I’ve put the questions to ask a web designer in the order a project runs, from the first call to month four after launch, so you can use them as a script.

Who will actually do the work?

The person who pitches you isn’t always the person who designs your pages. At a larger web design agency, a salesperson or account manager may run the calls, a designer you never meet makes the layouts, and a developer, sometimes a subcontractor, builds them. That model can work. You should know it before you sign.

So the first of the questions to ask a web designer is a plain one: who designs, who builds, who writes or edits the copy, and who answers my emails? A good answer gives names and roles. A weak answer says “our team handles everything” and moves on.

My answer is short, because Jackai Agency is one person. I run the research, design the pages, build them (mostly in WordPress, also in HubSpot CMS, Shopify and Framer) and answer the emails. There’s no account manager between the person who built your site and the person reading your numbers each week.

That has a cost, and you should hear it. One person can’t run five launches in the same week, and a web design agency with ten staff can absorb a sick week better than I can. If your launch date can’t move by a day, ask a solo designer what happens if they’re out, and ask a web design agency who takes over if your designer leaves mid-project.

Ask where the work happens, too. I work from Vancouver and remotely for clients in Seattle, the UK, Arizona and Florida. Subcontracting isn’t a problem on its own, whether a freelancer or a web design agency does it. It should just be named in the contract.

Is the price a fixed quote, and what does it cover?

Price is where most people start their questions to ask a web designer, and it’s the wrong place to stop. Hourly billing puts the risk of a bad estimate on you. A fixed quote puts it on the designer.

That matters, because software estimates tend to run over, not under, and a website is a software project. A review of software estimation surveys found that 60% to 80% of projects ran over on effort or schedule, with average overruns of about 30% to 40% (Moløkken and Jørgensen, 2003).

How a designer prices the job also tells you how clear the scope is. In a study of 93 offshore software projects, requirement uncertainty was one of the factors that explained whether a project was priced fixed or billed for time and materials (Gopal et al., 2003). If a designer won’t commit to a fixed quote, ask what they think is still unclear, and settle it before you sign.

Every project I take runs on a fixed quote. These are the common ones, in Canadian dollars:

• Small Business Website, 5 pages: CA$4,950 on Framer or CA$5,950 on WordPress, 2 to 3 weeks from the day content arrives.
• Custom B2B Website, up to 5 pages: from CA$7,450 on Framer, CA$8,950 on WordPress, CA$9,350 on Shopify or CA$9,700 on HubSpot.
• Marketing Site, 8 to 15 pages: from CA$10,495, over 4 to 6 weeks.
• Ecommerce build or migration: from CA$15,995.

Where a line says “from”, the final number depends on scope you can see in writing, such as page count and platform, and it’s fixed before any work starts. The full list and a calculator are on my pricing page and quote calculator.

What counts as a revision round?

A fixed quote is only as fixed as its revision terms. Mine include two revision rounds per phase. Ask any designer what one round means. A workable definition is one combined list of changes, sent once, by the person who signs off. Five people emailing separate notes over a week isn’t one round, and a good designer says so on the first call, not on the invoice.

Ask the designer to define a phase as well. A sensible answer splits the work into stages that each get a sign-off, such as page structure, visual design and the built site. Then ask what a third round costs before you need one.

What isn’t in the quote?

Of the questions to ask a web designer, this is the one most buyers skip. Ask for the exclusions in writing: copywriting, photography, stock image licences, paid plugin and theme licences, hosting fees, email setup, extra pages and changes after launch. None of these is a trick when it’s listed. Each one turns into an argument when it shows up in week five.

Photography is a common gap. I don’t shoot it, so if your site needs new team or product photos, I’ll say so on the first call and you can budget a photographer separately.

Two more for Vancouver buyers. Ask which currency the fixed quote is in, and whether tax is included. A quote from a US web design agency in US dollars can look cheaper than a local one until you convert it.

Who owns the site, the domain and the hosting?

Site ownership is the question that costs the most when nobody asks it. Here’s the version that goes wrong. The designer registers your domain in their own name, hosts the site on their own account and holds the only admin login. Everything works until the relationship ends. Then you’re negotiating for your own web address.

This is the vendor lock-in problem that shows up across software. A paper on lock-in in cloud services, which surveyed 114 participants, argues that most customers don’t know which proprietary standards will stop them moving later. It advises settling portability in the contract and picking vendors who use standard formats (Opara-Martins et al., 2016).

If you only get one of these questions to ask a web designer answered in writing, make it this one. Put site ownership in the contract and check each item:

• Domain: registered in your company’s account, with your email on it.
• Hosting: an account in your name that you pay, so the designer is a user you can remove.
• Admin access: a full administrator login of your own from day one, not a lesser editor role.
• Licences: paid themes, plugins and fonts licensed to you, or a written note of which ones lapse if you part ways.
• Files: design files and any custom code handed over at launch.

My standard terms say the client owns the site, the domain and the hosting. Ask for that sentence, word for word, in any proposal, mine included. A fixed quote that leaves site ownership out is missing its most expensive line.

Site ownership also means you can change your own pages without paying someone each time. On the Snappy Kraken HubSpot CMS redesign, for a B2B FinTech SaaS that sells marketing systems to financial advisors, I took the design from Figma to production in 3 weeks. The in-house marketing team now edits inside the design system. Ask any designer to show you, on a live site, how a non-developer adds a page.

What research happens before anything gets designed?

Of all the questions to ask a web designer, this one shows you how they think. A designer who opens a design tool before asking who visits your site is designing for themselves. Listen for named audiences and named tasks, not a style preference.

People decide where to click from small cues: a heading, a link label, one line of copy. Pirolli and Card call this information scent, and their model describes people adjusting their path to get the most useful information for the least effort (Pirolli and Card, 1999). When the cue on a page doesn’t match what a visitor came for, they move to whatever looks more promising.

On the W Communications website rebuild, for a Seattle communications and PR firm, four audiences landed on one homepage: media, clients, event bookers and readers. All four got the same opening paragraph. The rebuild gave each audience its own path, and it moved the founder’s credential, former Starbucks senior vice president, above the story on the biography page.

Ask for that kind of answer about your own site. Who arrives? What does each of them need to see on the first screen? If the designer can’t say yet, ask how they’ll find out.

I run audience research before design on every project. For Copy Chief, a copywriting education business, that meant coach interviews, member email outreach and a custom Python scraper that fed Reddit comments to an AI model to pull out pain points and desires.

What will you need from me, and by when?

This is the one item on the list of questions to ask a web designer that’s really about you. On my projects, the thing that slips first is rarely the design. It’s the content: service descriptions nobody has written yet, team photos nobody has booked, a sign-off waiting on a partner who’s away.

Everyone plans this part too hopefully, and it isn’t a character flaw. In studies of the planning fallacy, people underestimated how long their own tasks would take, while observers guessing for them erred the other way. The bias went away when people were asked to tie their forecast to how long similar past tasks had taken (Buehler et al., 1994).

So ask for a written list of what the designer needs from you, with dates. A useful list names each item, the person on your side who owns it and the deadline. Before you agree to a date, check how long your last brochure, proposal or website update took in real life.

Also ask when the clock starts. My 5-page Small Business Website takes 2 to 3 weeks from the day content arrives, not from the deposit. A fixed quote with a launch date that doesn’t say when the count begins has left out the part you control.

How will we know if the new site is working?

A site that looks better isn’t the same as a site that works better. Ask what the designer will measure, where the numbers are recorded and what the starting number is before launch.

Sometimes the honest answer is that there’s no before number. On the W Communications project, no analytics survived the rebuild, so that case study claims no result. If a designer always has a percentage ready, add one follow-up to your questions to ask a web designer: compared with what?

A good answer names a metric you care about and where it lives. On the Y Scouts lead funnel, for an executive search firm in Scottsdale, the Hiring on Purpose funnel converts visitors to leads at 17.7% (166 of 938), measured in the client’s own HubSpot.

For S.T. Dupont Vancouver, the French luxury brand’s authorized flagship store in Canada, online sales grew 5x in the first 90 days, against the last 90 days the old Wix store could sell. Same licence. Same products. Same store.

Ask whether each lead will arrive with its source attached. My lead attribution setup puts a UTM tag on every link, carries those tags through the form into your CRM, records the landing page and separates AI referral traffic from direct visits. Without that, “where did this lead come from?” gets a guess for an answer.

Then ask how they report results with more than one cause. The Snappy Kraken redesign influenced 7 figures of annual recurring revenue, and the case study says influenced, not attributed, because sales, pricing and the product itself all changed in the same period. A caveat like that is what a number you can trust looks like.

Which questions to ask a web designer about support after launch?

Most proposals give life after launch one line. It deserves its own set of questions to ask a web designer, because month four is when a plugin update breaks the contact form or your team needs a new landing page by Friday.

• Reply time: how fast do you answer, in business days, and is that in the contract?
• Rates: what does a change cost after launch, per hour or per task?
• Updates: who updates WordPress, plugins and themes, and who tests the site afterwards?
• Backups: where are they kept, how often do they run, and have you ever restored one?
• Exit: if we part ways, what do you hand over for full site ownership, and how fast?

My answers: I reply within 1 business day, and work after launch runs on a care plan at CA$279 an hour. You don’t need the care plan to keep your site, because site ownership stays with you from day one.

What I’d refuse from any designer, me included: a guarantee of a Google ranking or an AI citation. Nobody controls what a search engine or ChatGPT returns. A promise like that means the designer is guessing, or selling.

Retailers should add one more: who tested the checkout, and how? On the S.T. Dupont Vancouver store, Clover POS was connected and the payment path tested end to end before launch. An untested checkout is a support ticket waiting for a customer to find it.

How do you compare three proposals side by side?

Run each proposal through the same eight questions to ask a web designer and note the answers side by side.

“Unlimited revisions” sounds generous. In my experience it means the scope has no edge, and a project with no edge ends when someone runs out of patience, not when the site is done. A fixed quote with a set number of rounds gives the project an edge both sides can see.

The cheapest fixed quote with three walk-away answers isn’t the cheapest project. It’s the one where you pay the difference later, in your own hours.

Ask me every one of these on a 30-minute call

If you’re weighing a web design agency, a freelancer and me for a business website, bring this list of questions to ask a web designer to a call and run all eight on me. On the same call we measure your starting numbers: mobile conversion rate, AI-referred traffic and lead count. You keep those numbers whether or not you hire me, and if we go ahead, you get a fixed quote before any work starts.

Book a 30-minute call with Joshua

Sources

Peer-reviewed research

• Buehler, R., Griffin, D., and Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the “planning fallacy”: Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366-381.
• Fogg, B. J., Soohoo, C., Danielson, D. R., Marable, L., Stanford, J., and Tauber, E. R. (2003). How do users evaluate the credibility of Web sites? Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Designing for User Experiences, ACM, 1-15.
• Gopal, A., Sivaramakrishnan, K., Krishnan, M. S., and Mukhopadhyay, T. (2003). Contracts in offshore software development: An empirical analysis. Management Science, 49(12), 1671-1683.
• Lindgaard, G., Fernandes, G., Dudek, C., and Brown, J. (2006). Attention web designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression! Behaviour and Information Technology, 25(2), 115-126.
• Moløkken, K., and Jørgensen, M. (2003). A review of software surveys on software effort estimation. Proceedings of the 2003 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, IEEE, 223-230.
• Opara-Martins, J., Sahandi, R., and Tian, F. (2016). Critical analysis of vendor lock-in and its impact on cloud computing migration: a business perspective. Journal of Cloud Computing, 5, article 4.
• Pirolli, P., and Card, S. K. (1999). Information foraging. Psychological Review, 106(4), 643-675.