What to ask before you hire a web designer

Almost every owner who ends up with an unfinished, abandoned, or badly built website did not hire a bad person. They hired a person who was never asked the questions that would have surfaced the problem before any money moved. A designer who cannot answer a direct question clearly, before you have paid anything, will not become easier to get a straight answer from after. The questions below are the ones worth asking on the first call, and, more usefully, exactly what a pass and a fail sound like for each one.

Why the first call matters more than the portfolio

The first call matters more because a portfolio shows only finished work, not the projects that stalled or how a designer handles one that gets harder than expected. The only way to see that is to ask the 7 questions below and write down the literal words, not the impression they left.

Seven questions, and what pass and fail actually sound like

1. “What is the fixed price for what I need, and what would make it change?” Pass: a number, tied to a page count and a feature list, with the specific things that would raise it named up front — extra pages, e-commerce, custom animation, integrations. Fail: “it depends, let us have a call and we will put together a proposal” with no number offered even as a range.
2. “What exactly happens to my deposit if I change my mind before work starts?” Pass: a clear, specific answer — for example, a refundable booking that comes back if you back out before design work begins. Fail: a pause, a change of subject, or “that has never come up before,” which means it has never been written down either.
3. “When will I see the first actual design direction, and is that a real date or an estimate?” Pass: a specific number of hours or days stated as a commitment. Fail: “a few weeks, depending on our workload” — a timeline with no number is not a timeline, it is a hope.
4. “Can I edit the site myself after it is live, and can you show me how, right now, on a similar project?” Pass: yes, with a real content-management system, and a willingness to demonstrate it before you sign anything. Fail: “we handle all the edits for you,” which sounds like service and functions like dependency — every future change now runs through someone else’s schedule and invoice.
5. “What is the payment schedule, in plain terms?” Pass: a structure like half on your approval of the design direction and half when the site goes live, so you are never paying in full for something you have not seen. Fail: the full amount due upfront, or due before you have approved a single design.
6. “If I email you a question mid-project, how long before I hear back?” Pass: a specific commitment, such as a reply within one business day. Fail: no answer, or an answer that is really about how busy they are.
7. “Can you show me a site you built that is still live, still looks intentional, and was not for a client you are personally close with?” Pass: a real, working link, shown without hesitation. Fail: a slideshow of screenshots with no live links, or a link that now 404s — meaning it did not survive contact with a real owner running a real business.

Run the test before you take a single meeting

Run the test before you take a single meeting — you do not need a sales call to use it. Email the same seven questions, worded plainly, to two or three studios you are considering, and compare the written answers side by side rather than trusting whatever tone came across on the phone.

1. Send the identical seven questions to each studio by email, not verbally on a call, so you have their answers in writing and can compare them fairly.
2. Time how long each one takes to reply. Pass: within one business day. Fail: several days of silence before you have paid anyone a cent — the pattern rarely improves once you are a paying client waiting on a launch date.
3. Count how many of the seven questions got a specific answer — a number, a date, a named policy — versus a general reassurance. Pass: five or more specific answers out of seven. Fail: two or fewer, which usually means the rest of the relationship will run on vague reassurance too.
4. Click every live-site link they send you and check it actually loads and looks maintained, not abandoned mid-build. Pass: it works and looks current. Fail: a broken link, a placeholder page, or a site that clearly has not been touched since launch.
5. Read the payment terms back to yourself out loud. Pass: you could explain the whole structure to a friend in one sentence. Fail: you are still not sure when the money is actually due.

A studio that scores well here is not necessarily the cheapest, and it does not need to be. It is the one that has clearly done this before, enough times to have turned the answers into policy rather than improvisation. That is precisely what should decide who gets your deposit, not the mood of the sales call.

What we answer, for the record

For the record: we publish fixed prices from $999 on our pricing page rather than quoting on request. A deposit is a refundable booking, split roughly half on approval of the design direction and half at launch. You see a basic build and the live date within 48 hours, and we reply within one business day.

If the quote you already have failed several of the checks above, it is worth working out what a fair number actually looks like before you go back to the table — what a small-business website actually costs in Canada breaks down the real brackets. And if your current site is the one under discussion because it already is not pulling its weight, the signs that a website is costing you work is worth running before you commit to a rebuild. When you are ready to ask us the seven questions yourself, start with our contact page and judge the reply the same way you would judge anyone else’s.