Before You Pay Anyone to Build Your Website, Ask These Five Questions
Most bad website deals are lost before any code is written. Five questions that separate a fair quote from one you will regret.
Almost every bad website story starts the same way. Someone paid a deposit, waited, got something that half worked, and then could not get hold of the person who built it. The deciding factor is rarely the price. It is what was agreed before anyone started.
Ask these five before you transfer anything.
1. Who owns the domain, and whose name is on it?
This is the one that ruins people. If the developer registers the domain in their own name, they control your business address. When the relationship ends, or they stop replying, you cannot move your site and you cannot stop them from switching it off. Register the domain yourself, in your own name, on your own card. It costs about ten to fifteen dollars a year. Give the developer access if they need it, never ownership.
2. What happens when I want to change the text myself?
Prices change. Hours change. Staff change. If every edit means messaging someone and waiting three days, you will stop bothering and your site will slowly go out of date until it does more harm than good. Ask to be shown, before you pay, exactly how you would change a price on your own. If the answer is that you cannot, that is not a website, it is a dependency.
3. What is the monthly cost after handover, and to whom?
A one-off build price almost never means the site costs nothing to keep. There is hosting, the domain renewal, sometimes a page builder subscription, sometimes a maintenance retainer. Get every recurring cost written down with the name of who charges it. A quote with no ongoing costs listed is either incomplete or the recurring bill is going to arrive as a surprise.
4. Can I see it on my phone before I pay the balance?
Most of your customers will see the site on a mid-range Android phone on a patchy connection, not on a designer's large monitor. Plenty of sites that look excellent in a screenshot are unusable on a phone. Ask for a live link, open it on your own phone, and tap every button before the final payment leaves your account.
5. What exactly are you promising about Google?
Be careful here, because this is where most of the overselling happens. Nobody can guarantee you a position on Google. What a competent build should include is the technical groundwork: a page title and description, a sitemap, fast loading on mobile, and content that is actually in the page rather than assembled invisibly after loading. Ranking for a competitive search term on top of that is a matter of content and time, and it is a separate piece of work with a separate cost. If someone promises you page one as part of a website quote, treat the whole quote with suspicion.
One more thing worth knowing
Photographs decide more of the outcome than the budget does. A business that turns up with fifteen clear, well-lit photographs gets a good-looking site at almost any price point. A business with three blurry ones does not, no matter who builds it. If you are going to spend money before the build, spend it on someone photographing your work properly.
None of these five questions require any technical knowledge to ask, and the answers will tell you more about who you are dealing with than the quote will.