What to Ask Your Web Designer Before You Pay

None of these questions is technical. All of them fit in one message before you pay, and most people only discover them two years later, on the day they want to change providers.

1. The domain, in your name

It’s the most important one, and the most expensive when it’s missing.

The domain —yourbusiness.com— is registered to somebody. If that somebody is whoever built your site, the day you want to work with someone else you depend on their cooperation. There’s no technical fix: you either negotiate or start over with a new domain, losing everything Google already knew about you.

Ask for two things: that the registration is in your name or your company’s, and that the domain’s contact email is yours. That email receives the renewal notices, and it’s how domains get lost.

2. The four logins

With these four you can take everything and go wherever you want:

• The domain registrar — where it was bought and where it renews.
• The hosting or platform where the site lives.
• The Google Business Profile.
• The business email.

Without them, your online business belongs to someone else, even though you paid for it.

3. The scope, in writing, before you pay

How many pages, what goes on each one, what is not included, and when it’s delivered. The «what’s not included» part is the one that prevents arguments: it’s almost always online payments, photos, the copy and extra languages.

4. A number of revision rounds

Two is usually enough if you’re shown progress along the way, instead of seeing everything only at the end. The number matters less than the fact that there is one: without an agreed limit the scope stretches until somebody gets uncomfortable, and that discomfort always ends in the same unpleasant conversation.

5. Who writes the copy

It’s the biggest price difference between two quotes, and the one least often clarified. If you bring the text, the site costs a lot less. If they write it, by talking to you, that’s hours — and those are the hours that decide whether the site brings you customers or merely exists.

Ask explicitly. «A five-page website» doesn’t say who writes the pages.

6. What happens next year

• How much does renewing the domain and the hosting cost?
• Who updates the site when a price or opening hours change?
• What happens if you stop working together?

A website isn’t finished the day it goes live. Links break, content goes stale, things stop working when something changes on the server. It’s fine for maintenance to be optional; it isn’t fine for nobody to mention it.

7. What you’ll be able to measure

At a minimum: how many people visit, where they come from and how many contact you. If nobody installs anything that measures, six months from now you won’t be able to answer whether the site worked — and that’s the only question that matters.

And one warning sign worth all the others: if they won’t give you a price until after a meeting, what they’re sizing up isn’t your project. It’s how much you can pay.

The three checks you can do yourself

Without knowing anything technical, when the site is handed over:

Open it on your phone, over mobile data and not Wi-Fi. That’s how your customer will open it. If it’s slow, it’s really slow.

Search Google for your business name, two weeks later. Not for «website design in Panama» —that takes months— but for your own name. If you don’t show up after two weeks, something was connected wrong.

Ask someone who doesn’t know what you do to open it and tell you out loud what you sell. If they hesitate, the problem is the copy, not the design.

Ourselves

These are the three things we promise in writing, and they’re here because a promise you can’t verify is worth nothing:

• The site is yours. The domain is registered in your name and you get every login. If you ever work with someone else, you take everything with you.
• You pay in two halves. Half to start, with the scope and the date in writing, and the other half once you’ve reviewed the finished site, before it goes live. No surprise invoice at the end.
• We tell you what suits you. If fixing your Google profile is enough, we say so and you save the cost of the website.

Use this list with us too. If an answer doesn’t sit right with you, that’s exactly the conversation to have before you pay.