Most bad website experiences are not caused by bad design. They are caused by things nobody discussed before the work started: who holds the domain, who answers the phone when the site is down, what a small change costs. Those conversations are easy before you sign and painful afterwards.
Ask these six questions. How the answers come back matters as much as the answers themselves. Anyone who turns vague on the ownership questions is telling you something.
Who hosts it, and can I see the bill?
Hosting is where sites quietly go wrong. You want to know which company the site actually runs on, whether the account is in your name or your supplier's, and what it costs per year. There is nothing wrong with a supplier hosting your site on their own servers, and we do exactly that, so long as it is stated plainly and you know what happens if you leave. What you do not want is a hosting arrangement you cannot see, on an account you cannot access, at a price nobody will quote.
Whose name is on the domain?
Your domain name should be registered to your business, with your company as the registrant and an email address you control on the account. A supplier can manage it for you. A supplier should never own it. This is the most common way a small business gets stuck with a vendor it wants to leave, and it is almost always an accident rather than malice. Somebody registered it on a personal account in year one and nobody revisited it.
Ask to be shown the registrant record. It takes about thirty seconds to check and it is the cheapest insurance on this list.
What happens when it breaks at 6am?
Sites break. Certificates expire, a server reboots, an update goes wrong. The useful question is what the process is, not whether it will happen. Who finds out first, the monitoring or your customer? Is the contact a person or a web form? What does the supplier consider a normal response time on a Saturday?
A supplier who monitors their own hosting usually knows before you do. A supplier who does not will find out when you email them.
Can I leave, and what do I take with me?
Ask it directly. If we part ways in two years, what do I get? A good answer is specific: the domain, the content, the images, an export of the database, and either access to the hosting or a copy of the site somebody else can run.
Ask as well whether the site is built on anything proprietary to that supplier. A site built on standard tools can be moved. A site built on a system only one company runs cannot, which is not automatically wrong, but it changes the price of leaving and you should know that before you start rather than after.
What does a change cost?
Get the shape of this in writing before the build, because it is the cost you will live with for years. Reasonable things to ask:
- Which changes can I make myself, and which ones need you?
- What is the rate, and is there a minimum charge for a five minute edit?
- How long does a small change normally take to appear on the live site?
- Are updates, backups, and security patches part of a care plan, or billed each time?
Is training included?
If you are meant to update parts of the site yourself, somebody has to show you how, on your site, with your content, and leave something written behind for whoever joins next year. Training sold separately after handover is a sign the handover was never really planned.
One more thing
Ask for two clients you can call, ideally ones the supplier has worked with for more than a year. Anyone can show a portfolio of launches. A site somebody still looks after three years later tells you considerably more than a screenshot does.