Questions you may want to ask your web developer

Firstly, whether or not you know it, you want something using WordPress, or a similar CMS.

Secondly, your budget is at the lower end, so more like £20 a month at the low end, but more commonly £600 to £1,200 a year, for better quality regular and eCommerce site. It pegs the top-end with agency work still being under £6,000

Thirdly, if your budget is closer to £60 a year or less, you can stop reading now. Unless you are really good friends with a web designer, all you can hope for is the web equivalent of generic baked beans.

Fourthly then, in this price range, you want something more or less off-the-shelf but customised to suit. Perhaps with extra toppings.
(Don’t be bamboozled, even the top agencies do it this way. The BBC, Sony, Disney and even Facebook rely on WordPress!)

Fifthly, you either don’t know exactly what you want or have been bombarded with spiel intended to befuddle and bamboozle you into paying a lot of money for crap. Both shysters and corporate sales pitches come to mind here. In this case, you just want it explaining simply and honestly. I have your back!

Lastly, actually, you do know your stuff, are comfortable with terms like ‘agile methodology’, you hanker after something in Joomla or even bespoke from the ground up, and – why are you reading this, exactly?

The answer to this depends what you want and expect from them and, to a lesser degree, the amount of money involved. On your budget.

If the expert is actually any good, after even a brief introduction, they should know in their head roughly what you need, have a ballpoint cost in mind and already be picturing the end result. They should be able to grasp your level of experience and understanding. From there will follow the questions. What they need from you.

For instance, if you already have a brand, printed stationery you are happy with, it is likely to will want this continuing to your web site. As such they will require access to the graphics and typefaces used, perhaps need to liaise with your printer or graphic designer.

If yours is a niche business or industry they will want input and advice on specialist terms. If you have an existing client base it will matter how they already interact with you, and whether you want the site to continue to engage like that, or whether you would like to consider new methods. This will further solidify the web designers idea of the features you will require.

Beyond this, they can require images, videos, filler content, details of your social media plans. The more background and understanding they have, the better a job they should be able to do.

This raises the question of who will write the content.

If you happen to be or employ a copywriter yourself, that would be you. But if you are a semi-literate gardener, then they should be able to write the content from your notes, albeit for a price.

Regardless, the web design should be able to proofread your content, correct any and all grammatical and spelling mistakes and produce polished content that matches your expected audience. (Keywords and SEO is related, but is a separate point).

You would be expected to supply your own logos. However, if not, they should either have or know a graphic designer who can help you with that, for a price.

There are a number of free stock image libraries, typically they politely request a link back to the creator and this is a good source of free content. The web designer should be able to point you towards these or browse them for you (for a fee) if that is what you prefer.

Commercial stock images some at a premium. Lower quality ‘stock’ can be a few pounds each, but higher up the market, the price leaps into hundreds, even several thousand pounds for permission to one.

If you require video creation or product photographs, again, if they don’t have someone in-house, they should be able to help you find someone. Obviously, this incurs more costs.

This question, when I saw it, asked ‘Will I be able to change things on my website after its launch?’

The answer, in fitting with my premise, was that it absolutely should have a content management system, one that allows you to change content after it has been launched.

About that!

Firstly, a number of ‘web designers‘ – notably the ones that prefer esoteric page builders – like to keep an air of mystery, to keep to you out. To trap you, basically. I would be extremely wary of companies like that.

Secondly, suppose they give you limited access – and they used a page builder…

Now don’t get me wrong, while I am averse to the things, I know some are incredibly powerful, can make stunningly complex pages and… See, complex.

You’ve come to a web designer because you can’t do it yourself. A standard CMS, yes, most of those are not difficult to learn, but page builders can be clunky and annoyingly slow and hard to use, cause slow page load times due to code bloat, and can have a gazillion options that can make or break your website.

If they give you access and you can’t use it, how much access do you really have?
If you can’t use the page builders to edit content and must pay them for every change, what’s it really gonig to cost over time?

Lastly, some will use shitty ‘tricks’!
I’ve seen this and got the client to drop them.
In this cases like this the web designer will lock you out of the CMS partially or completely. We are talking about control freaks that won’t even allow you to apply security updates to the plug-ins they added, let alone add your own.
Then they charge you – monthly or quarter – to manually update the security, after they turned off automatic updates.

The less control you have over your own site, the more control they have over you! There are reasons not to let end-users meddle, those I fully understand and agree with, but the less control you have of your own site, the more it should concern you.

If it’s a CMS, such as WordPress, there is no reason for it not to be included free if you require one.

Blogs can be great, especially for SEO and for customer interaction. You post, you share. All good. Provided the content is good, that is, and the grammar and spelling. A bad blog can be much worse than having no blog.

If you require a copywriter and proofreader to assist with the blog, that is wholly separate from offering you a blog and should be charged accordingly. Or perhaps they can direct you to someone that can do it for you.

The first answer I read warned against choosing a developer who asks for full payment upfront, pointing out that good web developers tend to ask for a small amount upfront, with the balance on completion.
I more or less agree, but it depends, particularly with the nature of the deal and who has the most control.

In my case, for select customers, I might well ask for the full amount in advance!
So, I’m untrustworthy?
What if I pointed out that the fee here is typically around £20 a year, covering design, hosting, support, everything. That the total fee was just to cover the domain registration? That if they had already registered it and were keeping it active, the fee was £0; all they had to do was repoint the nameservers?
“Really? Sign me up!”
Actually, yes, I do offer that for charities, because I can, but it raises another point. It’s me. Just me. For a sole trader, or a bigger web designer with just one key worker, well, if that person was laid up or died, unless you control your domain, and have sufficient access rights to be able to backup and restore/transfer, your site dies with them!

Even without competition, in a world battered by Covid, or manic tariffs, or a wreckless government, money is tight, especially for small businesses.
For these, I might well ask for full payment in advance, depending on extras etc. (My dentist certainly has no problem charging like that.)
Unfair?
I suppose it depends on the fee (and what’s included)
£60 a year? That is less than people willingly hand over to some bob-a-job fixer-up, for 10 minutes up a ladder!
£600? Any number of tradesmen will charge that for a hour or two’s work.
£6,000? Have you ever had a quote to get your bathroom redone? Parts are like £200, then perhaps another £8,000 for a few days labour!

As you go up the scale, it is common to ask for 50% upfront, the rest on completion. Depending on the work involved, I’d argue this is fair. For myself, I’d look to offer two methods, either so much a month, (say £60), or so much a year, in advance, but with two months free hosting and support (so £600, a saving of £120).

I think, at least for me, it’s more to do with ‘vibes’ and gut feelings. There is a feeling, it seems, that if you go with the bigger places you are in safer hands. This is not always so.

There was a pie shop in town, well respected, lots of staff. People came from miles around. They made wedding cakes too, taking 50% and even full payment in advance. Right up to the middle of the day that they pulled the shutters down and told all their staff to go home, ‘cos they were bankrupt!

The directors knew they were in trouble, had known for months and hid it from staff and creditors, kept taking advance orders. Whether they were in denial and praying they’d weather it, or it was calculated was a mote point to all those customers (and staff) that lost out.

The first answer I saw offered to this was “4 to 6 weeks”. I laughed. A better answer is, “How long is a piece of string?”

If you want something simple and come prepared with good copy and images, the answer is “about an hour.” An afternoon if it needs a few rough edges taking off it.

However, if you require a highly involved eCommerce site with extra facilities, want it optimised to corner the local market, are designing by committee, then it will indeed take weeks or even months.

But it needn’t.

For instance, the Open University likes to use the OU running club as their example in some of their web design modules. It’s changed a bit since I last looked but not that much, just includes more javascript now. The functions were agreed upon by the committee and it was designed by an agency. It cost a few thousand pounds for this. We were asked to revise it for an assignment paper. After I ripped it apart (in my report) for numerous mistakes, I sat down and redeveloped it from scratch, fixing security problems, making it more accessible, and responsive. It only took me an afternoon. I am still not impressed with their effort.
(Looked again today. Seems like the cheeky buggers used some of the code from my paper to improve their site! 🤣)

If you only require an off-the-shelf style WordPress site, even with eCommerce, it should not take long at all.

However, if you require re-designs, new logos, extra hand-coded features adding…

I’ll stop you right there and say I both agree – and disagree.

In a moment all the web designers will be nodding, muttering, “Preaching to the converted, brother.”

As I say elsewhere, often the customer is clueless. Meaning no disrespect but you sometimes ask for things you do not need, do not understand. Some customers can be like toddlers in a toy store. They see something on a site that probably cost £25,000 to create and “So Shiny! I want that!” They want it for the same twenty quid a month they agreed for ‘everything’.

It’s feature creeping and occurs in programming, building, etc. Partway through, they tack things on, change requirements, but they still want the project completed on time, on budget. Corporates are buggers for it too!

If the design is a proverbial dog’s dinner, whether due to miscommunication on both sides, or due to the developer’s incompetence, they should make it right, or refund you fully.

If however, you don’t know what you want, so they walk you through each stage and give you exactly what you request – and you then are not happy, well sorry, that’s on you. Do your research.

There are two ways to consider this, firstly visually, “Does it work on…”
So iPhone, Android, tablets, PC, Mac…
Chrome, Firefox, MS Edge, Opera, Safari, newer browsers like Ecosia

This relates to browser support as much as anything.
For instance, .jpeg is supported by all, .webp by all or early all, now, .avif by most, but perhaps not all.

Are these CSS and HTML features fully supported? Are they deprecated now??
(Back in the day, in the wild wild west of the browser wars, this was a nightmare at times!)

In the the past I might have added ‘older browsers’, but hell no! Modern browsers auto-update for a reason. People should not be using old or ancient browsers, they are too insecure!

The second consideration is simple functions like menu links (glance up at Comodo SSL Store), email, forms…

Email is general not a problem, unless you are doing mail shots, but forms can be a pig. A lot of hosts, apache setups, CMS like WordPress etc have issues with forms because spammers love them so much.

I only use forms in a limited way but still need plugins and services like WPForms, WPMail SMTP, CloudFlare and Postmark

Next, as you move up the hill to taking payments, it gets a lot more important.

True, funny story:
I have this trader friend that used to turn up and say, “Can I have another website doing?”
And I’d say, “Sure, what do you need?”
And he’d whip out a sample of something like magnetic bracelets, risky t-shirts, a new digital camera – that he’d bought a container of – and say “These! Here, have a look. Give one to the kids”. And I’d give him a funny look and ask, “Just when do you need this for?”
He’d look at his watch and say, “2pm?”
I’d sigh, look at mine and say, “Joe, it’s 1pm…”
And he’d just grin, say, “I’m leaving for the NEC shortly. Ready for 2.30pm then?”
(Bear in mind this was the late 90s, early 2,000.)

Anyway, one day, having seen Amazon, he comes in and asks for a full eCommerce site, card facilities. The whole nine yards. Soon as.
“OK, I’ll need your bank details, I’ll need to talk to Verisign and others. Could take a couple of weeks.”
“Could you not just take the cards payments without telling the bank? Only, you know, I’m bankrupt and they want all the money I owe them back…”

Moving swiftly on, by about a decade, here’s an old post I did on Why it’s important to check your systems.

I’d sampled some product from a multi-national company and decided to go ahead and make the purchase. But they messed up the ordering system so badly that it wasn’t possible. Long story short, they’d come up with the product, had the websie built and waited for the money to flood in.

And waited. ‘If you build it, they will come!’

Thing is, they’d made last minute changes and not actually done a test purchase to see if it worked, so for several months, in fact until I wrote to them, they’d had no sales! All because of a broken link on a form.

8. Will my site be secure, will it have a padlock, will it have an HTTPS address with a valid certificate?

9. Who will be working on my website?

10. What’s the difference between a web developer and a web designer?

11. How much will it all cost?

12. Will you use a template?

13. Theme? Page Builder?

14. Is my new website going to be responsive?

15. How can I measure site performance?

16. Is my new website going to be accessible?

17. Who will own my website?

Funny but true story. A few years back (2021 I think) Google forgot to renew one of their domain names and someone bought it and redirected all the traffic!
Google Argentina went offline for several hours until they got it back and repointed to the right nameservers.
It happens to even the biggest of companies.

Scenario two is the web company sorts it.
Maybe they manage it for you, charging you accordingly, or maybe they buy it themselves and then, legally, it’s theirs! They own your site. If they then decide to raise your charges 100% or 500% you either pay the extortionate fees, fight it in court, or walk away and start over. This is not a place you want to be!
(Some countries (not you, UK!) do have laws about cyber squatting domains, passing off, etc, especially if it’s a trademarked named, but it would still be a hassle)

Backups? It’s complicated

The simple answer is it they are not automatically doing at least basic backups – for free or included in the quote – walk away.

However, staying with the ‘developer going bust’ thread. What if?
If they fail to pay their hosting provider, that company WILL purge all the sites on the server. And the backups. You can lose everything.

Less likely, but if the host goes bankrupt, same again,
If the web developer dies, and only they or one person in the company controlled the backups, you lose everything.

If the developer refuses to allow you to make your own backups, you might way to ask why. And be very wary. It may simply be that they are cautious, WordPress plug-ins need to be solid, messing about with settings can wreck your site. Maybe they are being cautious. Or maybe they are making sure you have almost no choice but to stay with them.

Finally, for backups, even if you have them, do they work? Do they restore as expected? Have you tested? Can you migrate? Can they set this up for you? It’s a peace of mind option for the paranoid, but if you bet the farm on it being fine, you may want to be sure. Won’t be important for a £300 landing site, but if you have an expensive eCommerce store taking a lot of orders, covering staffs salaries, paying your mortgage, you may question if you cannot afford not to.

Even something as simple as Jetpack can – for around £5 a month, do daily backups of your site, allowing you to restore at the click of a button. The more you pay, the more secure and resilient your backups should be.

I can give you any number of scenerios that will give you nightmares, but here’s a few I’ve encounted over the years:

One, it seems, had given superuser root access to a Russian hacker! I thought it was just me, that I’d many let them on, somehow, so I had it purged, reformatted and a new kernal install, with new passwords. The hacker was back on within an hour! This was a VPS server so I couldn’t get rid of the bugger. Ending up upgrading to a dedicated server to sort it!
(This was a long time back, before CMS, so I just uploaded the sites again).

I used to use Jetpack/Vaultpress as a backup provider. They build WordPress, what could possibly go wrong!?
Fun fact*: Vaultpress (for WordPress.org) is not fully compatible with Vaultpress (for WordPress.com).
As a backup, it’s easy, great. Recommended. But if – as I once did – you move a site between the two, it’s falls on it’s arse!
*Years later I am still fixing pages broken by that particular SNAFU!

The platform may be a factor, but staying with WordPress, even for the cheapest of sites, standard backups and patches should be free.
I was aware of one web designer that charged £140 a year for this, and I think it’s criminal!

Here I am not talking about extras, but a developer that locked the client out of the dashboard admin, deliberately disabled automatic security updates to WordPress itself and to plugins, them billed them to manually apply them. And did a half-arsed job on even that!

Expanding upon this is a separate issue. So, for example, Jetpack and Vaultpress could be offered as a cheap extra (or you can order it yourself), while a 100% uptime SLA with Cloudflare will run into thousands of pounds.

What if the site goes offline? Will they tell you?
Will they be there to talk to if it happens?
Will they have someone to talk to if it’s a host issue?

The free version of Jetpack USED to inform you of downtime for free, but now they want nearly £100 a year just for the scan part of it!)

Over the years – nearly three decades in fact – I have used a number of hosts, used and played with shared, VPS, dedicated and cloud options and I can tell you, you get what you pay for.

I’ll give you a few actual examples I’ve seen and experienced.

Once, many years ago, the company I had a server with sold their business to some American whale. The whale, interested in maximum profits, let all the UK staff go, overpopulated the server racks and were basically complete shits. Something went wrong and they ‘lost’ a number of servers. Every web developer affected – and there were thousands – saw their sites and their client’s sites lost. For something like 5 weeks, all these countless thousands of domains were down. And rather than be responsible, or let the developers move, they lawyered up and said, “We changed the contract, you are tied to it. You can leave, but you still have to pay.”

Another time, another host (Hostgator), all my sites went off-line intermittently for several weeks. Every time you spoke to the company they argued, “It’s not us, it’s you, everything is fine here”. I was LIVID. In the end, as I got more irate, they realised it was their fault – someone in their company had accidentally blacklisted my servers IP address. Internally, the server was running, externally, everything bounced.

Patch and bugfixes can break your site too. Once Jetpack took my site down. A lot of sites, actually.

Another time, a simple edit to a theme broke one of my sites. Took a bit of tinkering to fix. This is why test sites are best for playing around, not live ones!

These things do happen. Does your developer have an answer for that? He should, if it’s a concern.

One solution to downtime – depending on its cause – is mirroring redundancy, but this comes at a premium. In this instance, you might have two servers with two different hosts, in different countries, but the one URL (e.g. Qwertylicious.co.uk). The development costs do not increase, but the hosting and maintenance fees can more than double.

If they are a new company they probably won’t. This isn’t necessarily bad, quite the opposite, actually.

Firstly, they are new, so you can maybe haggle more on price, and should get more attention from them. Secondly, you get to start their portfolio. As long as they are any good, and start a professional portfolio page, this can generate traffic to your site and give your page rank a tiny nudge upwards.

I see a lot of sites and portfolios that… Well, they could be better.

This is true even for big agencies that can and do charges thousands, even tens of thousands of pounds for their work.
One boldly promoted a ‘RENAL’ car rental company in their portfolio.
Another, in a page-wide block, managed to spell ‘functional’ wrong, which is rather ironic.
Another proudly highlighted it’s blackhat spam idea.

Going back further, I’ve seen some typos and even horrendus messes on big names sites. Samsung comes to mind. I’ve called out Google once or twice too, a long time ago.
And one landing page by a major bank (Natwest) was so bad I thought I’d arrived at a spoofed fishing site by mistake. I was paranoid for weeks after that. Called them up and told them to fix that mess!

I was at a trade show once; a certain software company were promoting a new product. Not a web story, but it still serves a point. We were given free software, promoting the product. The walls were adorned with A0-sized posters of it. Six-foot tall product boxes leaned in corners. Piles of flyers. You get the idea. They spared no expense. I raised a hand and asked how buggy it was, and whether we could even trust it. I got a cold, hard glare from the UK manager. (He remembered me from the last year. In my defence, ‘last year’ was the launch of Windows ME!)
That product was ‘Microsoft Office Proffessional’ and family.

Uhuh!

Recently, I looked at local web designers, at their portfolios. I was mortified. Besides being unable to find any without errors, some were a mass of missing images and broken links. Some were simply small images that showed little detail and linked to nothing. Others went to dead sites or were redirected. Some claimed to have designed sites but when you looked at the footers of the live sites it was clear another company had created them.

If they say it’s their portfolio, you maybe want to make sure it is theirs. If you can check, that is. If you can’t check, you have to wonder why not. What are they hiding?

Sometimes, of course, it’s all good, which is what you want. If not, be wary.