Hiring a web designer is a big decision. The good ones will save you time and make your business a lot of money, and the bad ones will cost you both time and money. In web design, there are no certifications, licensing boards, or anything else to help guide you through the process — just this no-nonsense guide. Don’t sign anything until you’ve read this.
Table of Contents
- The Truth about Modern Web Design
- The Phone Call
- The Proposal
- The Website
- The Process
- Management & Marketing
- The Price
The Truth About Modern Web Design
Having a modern website can contribute significant growth to your business. Rather than thinking about your website as a simple digital design brochure, you should think of it as your business’s online marketing and sales hub.
A well-designed website can attract, educate, and convert your ideal customer. It does this around the clock, every day of the week, including holidays.
When executed well, a website can directly add five, six, or even seven figures to your bottom line. You can go from unknown in a market to sitting atop the leaderboard. And you can do all of this in a relatively short amount of time.
That’s not hype, it’s a very real possibility.
Another possibility, though, is that you lose substantial time (months/years), money (tens of thousands of dollars), and market position (priceless) by hiring the wrong agency or freelancer to design and/or manage your website.
Unfortunately, many businesses have learned this lesson the hard way. Investing tens of thousands of hard-earned dollars into a website that fails to deliver any real results, and that cannot be iterated on, scaled, or managed properly.
The wrong designer might build you a website that looks beautiful on the surface, but fails to convert visitors into customers. They might ignore critical factors like copywriting, the hosting server, loading speed, mobile responsiveness, or conversion optimization.
Or, perhaps, the site works in the beginning, but starts to cause significant issues as your business grows and scales. When websites aren’t built for scalability and maintainability, they turn into a liability instead of an asset.
Or worse, you might hire a freelancer that fails to deliver on time, strings your project along for months and months, or disappears altogether mid-build. Unfortunately, this too is a common scenario in our industry.
The conclusion is simple: choosing the right agency or freelancer is critical and it’s up to YOU to educate yourself and make the right choice.
In web design, there’s no oversight board, no industry licensing, no real certifications, or anything else to ensure you’re hiring the right people. And I’m guessing you don’t have a significant amount of experience working or hiring within this industry, so how can you possibly know how to tell the good designers from the disastrous ones?
That’s where this guide comes in.
It’s a quick read that will arm you with the tools needed to help steer you away from disaster and toward the fantastic results you’re hoping to gain from your new website.
Read it and use it to make your final choice. My goal is to educate you so you can make the best decision for your company, whether you decide to hire me or hire someone else.
Ready? Then let’s get started.
The Phone Call
Most agencies and freelancers refer to the first phone call as a “Discovery Call”, “Sales Call”, or “Strategy Call”.
Here is what should be covered on this call:
- Identifying your company’s main goals
- How a new website helps achieve those goals
- Details on the process of creating your new website
- General pricing expectations
- Timeline expectations
- Next steps
If they are good at what they do, whoever is leading the sales call will put most of the focus on you and your business. If the focus is mostly on themselves, their history, former clients, and how great they are… put your guard up.
Additionally, if you experience any of the following, it’s a red flag:
- A lack of questions about your company and its goals
- Offering a one-size-fits-all solution
- Pushiness
- Disorganization, or searching for things to ask you
- Questions about your personal design taste
- Lowball pricing
Legit agencies and freelancers are interested in getting quality clients, and their goal is to help you achieve your goals. In the best-case scenarios, you might actually feel like you’re the one being interviewed for the job. This is because good designers are vetting clients as much as clients are vetting designers.
If you feel like the person has a genuine interest in your company, is seeking to understand important details about your company, is willing to provide strategy-related advice out of the gate, and is open and honest about their process and pricing, you’re off to a great start.
Consequently, here are some things to make sure you are prepared for the call as a client:
- Know your “goals of consequence”. What do you want the website to do for your business? “A good-looking website” is not a goal of consequence. How many leads or sales per week are you aiming for? What ranking positions are you hoping to achieve?
- Know what your existing website does or doesn’t do. Does it get traffic? How much? From where? Leads? How many? You don’t need specifics, but it would be good to review your analytics ahead of the call. If you don’t know these numbers, ask yourself why. It’s a sign that you need someone managing your website who is on top of this stuff.
- Know what you’re willing to invest. A good designer won’t come cheap because they know they are going to be adding five, six, or even seven figures to your bottom line. Don’t be surprised to hear them throw out numbers like $10k, $25k, $50k+ (depending on the specifics of your business and website).
Once the call concludes, you’re likely moving on to the proposal stage.
The Proposal
The proposal phase of the project should take the stuff you have already talked about and put it into writing. There is what you should expect to see in a proposal:
- Brief history of the agency or freelancer.
- Details about the process and workflow
- A statement of work detailing all key deliverables.
- Pricing that’s in the range you discussed on the call, and payment terms.
- A detailed timeline.
The proposal is not supposed to contain sales literature and should only focus on the project details. The phone call should inspire and motivate you to work with the designer, and the proposal should solidify all of those details in writing.
If you feel like the proposal is just trying to continue selling you on the project with hype and promises, it’s a red flag. Or, if the proposal contains stuff you haven’t yet talked about—or contradictory
Here is a list of red flags to watch out for:
- No formal proposal, just casual emails.
- No details about their process and workflow.
- No statement of work with a breakdown of the project.
- Unclear pricing or payment structure.
- A vague or missing timeline.
Assuming that all necessary elements are present, the next crucial topic to address is the designer’s process. This aspect is arguably the most vital part of the vetting procedure. Exceptional designers possess exceptional processes. That being said, you should be able to identify the bad ones from a a mile away.
The Website
What type of website do you need?
How many pages does it need to be?
What should it look like?
The agency or freelancer you’re working with is going to determine these things, but you should have a general idea of how these considerations are made as well.
What are the goals of the site?
Here are some common outcomes that businesses want from their website:
- Sell products or services
- Generate leads
- Drive traffic and brand awareness
- Establish authority
- Educate and nurture
- Entertain
- Assist an outside sales team
- Recruit affiliates
- Build an email list
- Generate ad revenue
These are what we call “goals of consequence”. In other words, they matter.
Some clients don’t make these goals a priority, though. For example, they might just say “the old site is outdated”.
But “updating” a website has no value unless we’re going it for a good reason, so it’s important to be able to articulate real goals and know why you’re investing good money in this process.
Single-page vs Multi-page
A website can either be a single page or multiple pages. Both are viable options, depending on the type of business and the goals you have for the website. The choice also depends on how you plan to market the website.
For example, if SEO is important to you and it’s decided that SEO is a main strategy for marketing the site, the agency or freelancer should immediately inform you that a lot of pages are needed in order to rank higher. A single-page or even a 5-page website is not going to move the needle in SEO.
If, on the other hand, you have very specific products or services and are going to invest heavily into PPC advertising or social media advertising, a single-page website might be totally viable.
The single-page website will always be cheaper than a multi-page site. But, the decision to go single-page or multi-page should have little to nothing to do with the cost and everything to do with strategy.
The one caveat would be that businesses that have a low budget, but want to work with a specific designer, and the most they can afford is a single-page site. The plan might be to start with a single-page website and then expand it over time, rather than starting a multi-page site out of the gate.
5-pages or 50-pages?
One of the most common things I hear from clients is, “We only need a small site, maybe 5 or 6 pages”. Oh, geez.
There are 2 problems with this statement:
- The people with the expertise should be determining the number of pages, not the client.
- Clients underestimate the number of pages they need to achieve their goals.
I find the reason clients say this is because they are quietly signaling the desire to keep costs down as much as possible. We as designers, as humans, already get this.
At the same time, though, you need to do what’s effective. Eliminating critical pages to save a few bucks is going to generate much higher costs in the long run, because your website is less effective in making you money.
Would you dare hire an attorney and say “I need you to create a business contract, but it only needs 5 or 6 sections”. Hell no! You hired the attorney in order to write you an iron-clad contract, no matter how many pages it consists of.
Here’s an SEO-based example. Client says “We need a page for roof repair”. In their mind, they’re thinking that’s just one page, but the SEO expert knows you will actually need a separate page for:
- Shingle roof repair
- Metal roof repair
- Tile roof repair
- Composite roof repair
- Flat roof repair
- Slate roof repair
And then you might need additional pages for those in key areas you’re trying to rank in.
The same is true on the PPC side of things. Ads work best when they’re specific and when they take people to high-specificity landing pages. So, the pages needed for SEO are often needed for PPC as well.
The point is, the number of pages is determined by the main goal and you need to do what needs to be done to achieve those goals at the advice of experts.
What should the website look like?
Rather than talking about what the website should look like, we need to talk about who should determine what the website should look like.
A professional website designer is who determines what a website should look, not the client! If the client is not a professional website designer, they have no business dictating design details.
This is a common point of conflict in my industry. Clients think that since they’re paying for the work, they should have a lot of input on the design details. They do and they don’t. It’s important to know when you need to stay in your lane and when you can cross over.
If you inform an agency or freelancer that you want the website to achieve Goal #1, Goal #2, and Goal #3 and then get heavy-handed in telling them how to do their job on the design side of things, the agency or freelancer is no longer responsible for achieving those goals.
Guess who is responsible now… YOU!
Design is a big part of the digital orchestra that is supposed to make great music. You can’t logically replace the conductor with yourself and then complain when the music sucks.
Does this mean you aren’t allowed to have any input? Of course not!
If the designer submits a site design that you feel is off-brand or that doesn’t look great for whatever reason, you can certainly voice your opinion. You can also point out specific things you don’t like.
What you should refrain from doing is giving them specific guidance on exactly how things should change. Taking control over design details when it’s not your role often leads to results that you may like, but that others won’t. Furthermore, the visitor to your website probably views it as unprofessional looking, because the decision was made by a non-professional. Optics are everything.
Here are the main takeaways:
- Let the experts determine what needs to happen.
- Ask for clarification on anything you don’t understand the value of.
- Feel free to request edits or changes, but don’t try to become the expert. This is a form of self-harm.
- Ask to scale down the scope if it’s over budget.
Let’s talk about #4 in that list. At the end of the day, you control the scope because you hold the purse strings. A good agency or freelancer should be able to adjust the project scope to fit your budget, knowing this may impact your goals, outcomes, and marketing strategies.
If you’re okay with the consequences of a reduced scope, then they can quote and deliver a reduced scope. Good websites are designed to be updated and expanded easily over time.
The Process
If the agency or freelancer you’re considering doesn’t mention these important steps, think twice!
One glance at a designer’s process should tell you everything you need to know about their propensity to deliver results.
Just to recap: the agency or freelancer should have clearly explained the process during the sales call and included those details in the proposal. If you got through both of those stages and still don’t know the details of their process, it’s a major red flag.
Here is what their process should generally look like:
- Discovery
- Copywriting
- Wireframing
- Design & Development
- Testing & Launch
- Management & Marketing
Discovery
As a designer, we can’t do our jobs effectively unless we have details and data related to your business and your industry.
We can’t rank you on Google without doing research and planning.
We can’t write effective copy without knowing the ins and outs of how your customers think and feel.
When it comes to layout and user experience, we need to know what your ideal customer expects.
There’s a lot of information to gather and insights to glean from others in your industry, and this is done in the Discovery phase. If an agency or freelancer isn’t doing discovery, they’re essentially tackling your project on guesses and prayers.
Copywriting
Pop quiz: What’s the most important part of any website?
Got your answer?
Many people prioritize design and technical development, but the most crucial aspect of any website is the copy—the words on the page.
Believe it or not, you can have the ugliest website on the internet and still make millions of dollars by saying the right things at the right time.
The biggest red flag imaginable is when an agency relied on copy provided by you! They should explain to you how important professional copywriting is and insist that a professional copywriter handle it for you.
Many agencies don’t mention copy and are pleased when you’re willing to provide it. Major red flag! They’re going to put all the pieces in place, except for the most important one, leaving you with a beautiful website with a terrible conversion rate.
Copywriting is where the major money is made — do not choose an agency that neglects this part of your project.
Wireframing
Before we designers can spend time making things pretty, we have to know what the flow and general layout of each page is going to be. We do this by creating wireframes.
Think about building a house. Do you ask the framers, sheetrock guys, and interior design team to start working on the house before the architect draws up blueprints?
Of course not.
But this is actually an area where many agencies and freelancers try to cut corners. They either use a cookie-cutter template or a “design as we build” approach, which creates tons of inefficiencies and a significant amount of rework. And the development environment gets very messy during all this iteration.
There’s also a very high probability that agencies who are willing to design-as-they-go are curing corners in other areas related to the scalability and maintainability of your site.
The bottom line is this: if they’re not delivering wireframes, they’re planning on building blind.
Run away.
Design & Development
Once the wireframing is done, the design & development phases can start. This is the really fun part from your point of view!
There are some key things you want to see, and ask about, in regards to the process:
- Your site is developed in an open-source platform where you own and control your data (e.i. WordPress). Avoid closed-environment platforms like Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, Webflow, etc.
- You site is developed on a scalable sub-platform like a custom theme or professional website builder (tools like Breakdance, Beaver Builder, WP Bakery, Elementor, GoDaddy, and Divi ARE NOT professional builders).
- Your site is developed with best practices for scalability and maintainability. Make sure they are using CSS classes, page and section templates, customizable components, dynamic data loops, and conditional logic.
- Your site is developed with accessibility in mind and adheres to WCAG accessibility standards.
- Your website images are sized and optimized to maximize speed and responsiveness.
- Your site is developed on a live development server and you are given a URL to check and monitor progress at all times.
Sure, much of this will be over your head, but you can certainly ask about these things and see how confident the designer is when giving their answers.
If there is one thing on this list that you should not let them talk you out of or change, it is point #1. It’s imperative that you own and control the data on your own website. No part of it should be owned by the platform it’s developed on.
Testing & Launch
If the designer has great processes in place, you’re going to make it to the launch phase on time and without too much drama.
The testing phase is where you get the opportunity to go through the entire site and see if there are any small changes that you want to make before launch.
It’s like a final walkthrough when you buy a home. You’re going in to see if there are any issues with paint and appliances and such — you’re not asking the builder to knock down a wall.
Submit your punch list, the designer will fix things up, and then you’ll be all set to launch.
This isn’t the final step in a good process, though. If an agency or freelancer stops here, and just hands the site off to you and says “Good luck!”… this is a bad deal for you.
The final step of any great web design agency process is management and marketing.
Management & Marketing
What happens after the website is published and live? Before you sign any contract, make sure the agency you’re working with has also discussed website management and marketing with you.
What types of Website Management plans do they offer?
What’s their plan and area of expertise when it comes to online marketing?
These 2 questions are very important because:
- Websites are very technical and they require technical expertise to manage and maintain. With the (wrong) click of the mouse, your site may break or disappear.
- “If you build it and they will come” is just a line in a movie — it’s 100% false in real life.
You do not want an agency that is going to launch your site and tell you “Good luck!”
Read that last line again! And again!
You website will literally sit there, do nothing for you or your business, and slowly rot away.
Good agencies and freelancers know that a website is a living, breathing thing and you need someone to care for it and nurture it to grow results.
Management
Most agencies and freelancers offer varying levels of management, and it’s best that these packages are not blended with marketing packages. Ideally, marketing plans are sold separately, allowing you to cancel or change a marketing plan without affecting the management plan that’s in place.
Basic Website Management plans will cover things like:
- High-performance hosting servers
- SSL certificates
- Performance optimization and upkeep
- Backups (both onsite and offsite)
- DNS management services
- General site maintenance & plugin updates
- Security measures and server monitoring
- Facilitation of any changes/edits
A more advanced plan will cover:
- Higher-tier hosting for eCommerce sites or high-traffic sites
- Advanced analytics tracking, monitoring, and reporting
- Integration with Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Have the agency or freelancer walk you through the details of their plans — they should help you make an informed decision for your specific business rather than trying to upsell you to the highest-priced plan.
Marketing
Good agencies and freelancers have areas of expertise when it comes to online marketing. It might be SEO, PPC, Social Media Marketing (SMM), Digital PR, or a number of other areas. If they offer you campaigns for this, sign onto them for at least 6 months (if you can afford to). You have to actively drive traffic to your website if you want to win and it takes time to dial in good results.
Here are typical ways of driving traffic, leads, and sales online:
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Basic SEO is easy and inexpensive. Advanced SEO is highly technical and very expensive. Basic SEO won’t do much for you, but is necessary to get indexed on search engines like Google properly.
- PPC (Pay Per Click): This is the fastest way to generate ROI from search engine traffic. You essentially pay to be listed in the paid results that are shown first for important search results related to your industry/product/service. A good PPC campaign typically drives traffic to a landing page with a specific offer, and a lot of effort is put into the offer, copy, and conversion. Expect to spend a minimum of a couple thousand dollars per month.
- SMM (Social Media Marketing): It’s not advisable to pay for social media marketing unless the agency you’re working with is social media rockstar that is going to produce a top-tier social media campaign for you, which also happens to be very expensive. The only other viable option here is to pay to receive social media training to handle this in-house. Don’t entertain relatively cheap social media marketing plans—they’re generic and ineffective.
- Email Marketing: Very effective, very efficient, and very high ROI for many business types. The problem is, it’s only effective if you already (1) have a sizeable email list or (2) a lot of traffic to your website. If you have a list, and you’re not using it to its potential, definitely let an email marketing expert take the wheel. A good email marketing plan should include strategies for building a list, provided you have enough website traffic.
- Google Business Profile: This is one of the best things to setup… and best of all, it’s FREE to do! Google gives you the ability to setup your business and showcase your phone numbers, hours of operation, photos, specials, and reviews. This is great for local SEO and something every business should have activated.
- Online Reviews: The best value for attracting new customers and improving search engine rankings. For less than $100/month, you can increase your positive online reviews and outperform your competition.
- YouTube / TikTok: Very good for certain types of businesses, but falls heavily into the social media bucket and comes with the same challenges.
- Paid Advertising: You can run paid advertising in many different ways, and on many different platforms. Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Google, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc all offer paid advertising opportunities. There are also private, paid advertising networks. The agency needs to be an expert in the specific platform/network you’re going to be advertising on for the campaign to be effective.
- Sponsorship & Influencer Marketing: This strategy involves collaborating with individuals or brands that have a significant following within your target audience. By leveraging their influence, you can boost brand awareness and credibility. It’s essential to choose influencers whose audience aligns with your brand’s values and demographics. Costs vary based on the influencer’s reach and engagement, but successful campaigns can significantly enhance visibility and potentially increase sales. Prioritize authentic partnerships and closely monitor performance metrics to assess the return on investment.
- Content Marketing: Content marketing focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage a clearly defined audience. This involves blog posts, videos, infographics, and more. Effective content marketing establishes your brand as a thought leader and builds trust with your audience over time. While generally cost-effective, it requires a strategic approach and regular updates to maintain engagement. High-quality content can improve SEO rankings, drive traffic, and ultimately lead to conversions. Plan for a long-term commitment to see substantial results.
- Offline & Local Marketing: Offline and local marketing strategies focus on engaging potential customers in your physical vicinity and through traditional channels. This can include print advertising, local events, sponsorships, direct mail, and community engagement. These methods are particularly effective for businesses with a strong local presence or those targeting specific geographic areas. While often more costly than digital methods, they can significantly boost brand recognition and customer loyalty in your community. To maximize impact, integrate offline efforts with online strategies, such as promoting local events through social media or using QR codes to drive online traffic.
The Price
I’m sure you noticed, but web design pricing is all over the board these days. I will explain how it’s calculated, what you should expect to pay, and the payment structure you should request.
Most good web design agencies or freelancers DO NOT charge by the hour. They use a mix of cost-based pricing and value-based pricing, which means a lot of the price is subjective. A skilled agency or freelancer charges more because their expertise and consistency reduce risks and increase the chances of project success.
How much more should they change? That’s up to them and what they’re willing to do for the work, for and up to you to and what you’re willing to pay.
The real question here is: Would you rather light $5,000 on fire and then have to start over, or pay $20,000 out of the gate and get a website that grows your business’ bottom line?
“Cheap” in web design is almost always the most costly option.
Go back and read that line again. It’s not just about “total failure” scenarios, either. One of the most common occurrences is, “Great job, now why isn’t it bringing in business?”
In other words, the agency or freelancer delivered a website that looks great and works fine. Except there are no results. The conversion rate is very low (probably because there was no discovery, no professional copy, no offer, terrible UX/UI, etc.). It doesn’t drive any traffic (no marketing plan), and it just kinda sits there.
If you understand the concept of opportunity costs, this can be crazy expensive. Businesses can’t afford to sit still and do nothing. If you want your website to generate a million dollars in revenue, an ineffective site could be costing you over $2,700 each day.
That may be way above what’s realistic for your business, but that’s how you have to look at it. This is why we designers say “The web is not a beauty contest”. It doesn’t matter how good the website looks or how well it functions, it has to say the right things, at the right time, to the right people to turn visitors into dollar bills. If it’s not doing that, what’s the point of even having it?
It’s actually better if the agency or freelancer totally drops the ball, disappears, and leaves you with an unfinished project. Yeah, you might be out a few thousand dollars in that scenario, but now you’re free to move forward with a professional that works toward a solution.
I say all of this to make sure you’re understanding one thing: price should never be the deciding factor in choosing a web design agency or freelancer. Hire based on expertise, track record, process, and culture.
Here are some additional pricing insights:
- Don’t expect to spend less than $3,500 in the U.S. market. Even for a one-page website, there is not enough money there to do each step of the process, much less to do it properly. Expect prices to open around $5,000 with most small business projects easily exceeding that.
- Try to avoid paying hourly. A lot of designers will underbid your project when bidding hourly because they can drag the project along at an incredibly slow rate in order to milk the clock and make more in the long run. Meanwhile, you have lost time, money, and your sanity while waiting for your website project to be completed.
- Try to avoid milestone payment formats. This format incentivizes both the client and the designer to stall if they get overwhelmed. Instead, opt for a pre-pay, 4-pay, 12-pay, or 24-pay option with regular monthly payment installments.
- Avoid WaaS (Website as a Service) agencies or freelancers who use very low monthly payment models. They’re almost certainly going to resell the same template to you as they do to all of their clients and give you a cookie-cutter site that fails to deliver the results you’re wanting for your business.
Conclusion
Hiring a web design agency or freelancer requires careful consideration and due diligence. By understanding your business goals, being prepared for initial conversations, and evaluating proposals thoroughly, you can avoid potential pitfalls.
Pay attention to their process, the importance of professional copywriting, and how they manage and market websites post-launch. Remember that choosing an agency or freelancer should be based on expertise, proven results, and alignment with your objectives, rather than solely on cost.
A well-executed website project can significantly impact your business’s success, making it essential to partner with a designer that prioritizes quality and strategy. Take the time to make an informed decision, and you’ll set yourself up for a positive outcome that contributes to your business growth.
To reiterate what I said earlier… whether you choose to hire me or someone else, my only goal at this point is to educate you enough to allow you to make an informed decision that is in your company’s best interest. I hope I was able to successfully do that.