Choosing and engaging a web designer

What this choosing-a-web-designer section is for

This is the part of the process where the most money is committed on the least information. You are choosing between suppliers whose work you cannot fully assess, on quotes that describe different things, before you know the vocabulary well enough to ask precise questions.

These pages are written to make the questions precise.

Freelancer, studio or design agencies: portfolio review and what these choosing pages cover

The choice itself: freelancer vs agency, offshore vs local, and DIY vs a professional web designer. A portfolio review belongs in every one of those choices, not just the agency comparison, because portfolio quality tells you far less on its own than portfolio quality read alongside who actually did the work.

Then the engagement: what should be in a website quote, how to compare website quotes that are not directly comparable, and questions to ask a web designer before signing anything.

Then the parts nobody wants to need: red flags when hiring a web designer, what to do if your web developer disappears, getting your website logins back, switching web designers mid-project, and can you sue a web designer if the work is not delivered.

Choosing the right web design agencies in Australia: digital goals, communication and post-launch strategy

The right web design agency for one business is the wrong one for another, and the difference usually comes down to three things a portfolio does not show: communication style, how clearly your business goals were translated into the brief, and what happens after launch. Ask how the agency handles post-launch support before you sign, not after something breaks. A supplier with a clear digital strategy for your business, not just a template, will be able to describe your goals back to you in your own words rather than generic language borrowed from someone else’s industry. That same digital strategy also has to account for the development work that follows the design phase, not only the visual front-end.

The obvious disclosure

The person writing this builds websites for a living. A page describing how to choose between suppliers is written by one of the suppliers, and that is worth holding in mind on every page in this section.

What is different here is that nothing on this site refers enquiries anywhere, takes affiliate fees, or is paid to recommend anybody — the full position is on commercial relationships. That removes the financial reason to steer you. It does not remove the professional bias of someone who has strong opinions about how this work should be done, and those opinions are throughout.

The practical test: every question on these pages is one you can put to me as readily as to anyone else. If a page ever suggests a question you should not ask a supplier, that page is wrong.

The right order for choosing between a freelancer, studio and agency, and where development fits

Most people meet these questions in the wrong order, which is why the process feels harder than it is. The sequence that works:

What are you buying? Not which supplier — what. A brochure site, an online store and a booking system are three different projects with three different cost structures, and a quote that does not say which one it is describing cannot be compared with anything.

What shape of supplier suits it? A freelancer, a small studio and a design agency differ less in skill than in how much coordination and direct communication they hand back to you. That is the real variable and it is rarely stated in a proposal.

What has to be written down? Scope, ownership, hosting arrangements, what happens if the relationship ends. These are cheap to agree before work starts and expensive to argue about afterwards.

Only then, who? Choosing a person before knowing the first three answers is how projects end up scoped around what a particular supplier happens to sell.

What to have ready before the first conversation

You do not need a brief to talk to a supplier, but you need five answers, and having them makes every quote you receive more accurate:

• What the site has to do — take bookings, take payment, explain a service, be found for a suburb
• Roughly how many pages of real content exist or will be written, and who is writing them
• Whether you already own the domain, and who has access to it
• Your own goals for how the project runs — how often you want updates, and through which communication channel
• A budget range, even a wide one

The last is the one people withhold, on the theory that naming a number invites a supplier to spend it. In practice a supplier without a range guesses, and usually guesses wrong in a direction that wastes both parties’ time.

When it goes wrong

Several pages here deal with the part nobody plans for when engaging a web design agency: a supplier who stops answering, logins nobody can find, a project abandoned halfway, development work that was paid for and not delivered. They are written because these situations are ordinary rather than rare, and because the options available to you narrow considerably the longer you wait to act. For what web design covers as a discipline, before you choose who does it, start with web design in Australia.