How to Choose a Web Designer for Your Service-Based Business.
Hiring someone to help you put your business online is a big decision and a big investment. And with the whole internet at your fingertips, it's a choice you should feel equipped to make confidently. In this post, I've outlined the most important things to consider when hiring a website designer for your service-based business.
Key points:
Get clear on what you need your site to do before you hire anyone. If you can't yet answer “why now?”, “what is the site for?”, and “do you have something specific to say?”, building now may mean for a very nice container for an idea that may change in six months.
Get clear on the kind of help you're looking for. "Web designer" can cover the work of up to five different jobs: brand strategy, copywriting, brand design, web design, and development. Almost nobody is a specialist in all five. Determine where you actually need help, where you want to spend the most money, and find out what's covered before comparing quotes.
A set of technical fundamentals should be standard at launch rather than sold back to you later, including search setup, legal pages, accessibility, email authentication, and mobile. Confirm with whoever you hire that what you need is included in what you're getting.
Judge someone's portfolio on substance over style. Even designers have different ideas of what looks good. What you want to see is that the websites on display have a cohesive overall look and feel, that the tone of the copy matches the vibe of the design, and that the site seems to be doing what it was intended to do: promote the site's owner, effectively.
Choose to work with someone because their approach makes you feel calm, clear, and in good hands, not just because you like the way their work looks. Check in with yourself after talking to them and see how you feel. Did they ask good questions before offering a quote? Did they explain the process clearly? Make sure they are easy to talk to and that you'd feel comfortable voicing a concern if you had one.
Costs vary widely, and where you invest your money depends on your needs.
When you are choosing someone to build your business website, you should have four main considerations.
What do you need your site to do?
What kind of help do you need to get there?
And who do you trust to lead you through it?
What does it cost?
There are no right answers to these questions. They are meant to help you get a clearer idea of what you're investing in and whether you're ready.
1. What do you need your site to do?
If you don't yet know, or can't arrive at, an answer to this question, it may be too soon for you to make a big investment in a professionally built online presence.
A website is a digital representation for the web of something that exists in the world. If the thing being translated (your business) is still taking shape, you'll end up investing a lot of time, energy, and money in a very nice container for an idea that changes six months later.
Here are some questions to help you get some clarity:
Why now? Are you just venturing out on your own? Are you changing your niche? Did you raise your rates and want to come across differently? Are you embarrassed to send the link to potential clients? Any of these is a legitimate reason to get some help.
What do you need it to do? Is your site just a digital shingle? A place to send referrals so they can see you're legit? Is it a place to attract a specific kind of client and gently deter others? Do you have a course to sell? Do you need a place to publish content about a particular topic? The answers to these questions point to sites with genuinely different functions.
Do you have something specific to say yet? This is the hardest one to answer. A practice in its first year is often still discovering what it is. If you cannot yet describe what you actually do and who you work best with, no one you work with can extract it, and the result will be a site that's polished but not memorable. That doesn't mean not to go ahead and build one, but know that you may also be wanting to invest in a new one in a year or two.
2. What kind of help do you need to get there?
First thing's first: Know who you're hiring and know what you're buying.
Who you're hiring:
The job of a "web designer" might encompass up to five distinct specialties and a variety of skills, all of which also might be described as "copywriter," "brand designer," or brand "strategist", some of which overlap sometimes, but not always. This can cause some confusion when it comes to knowing what you're getting. Almost nobody offers specialist-level expertise across all aspects of the work, and that's probably fine for your needs. What you need to decide is which part of the job is most important for you to invest in, given your priorities.
Brand strategy is the thinking underneath. Who the practice is for, what it is claiming, what makes it recognizably yours rather than generic, and what clients need to hear to trust you enough to hire you.
Copywriting is the actual words that communicate all the important information. Writing for the web has a whole set of best practices that don't come naturally, even to the most experienced and articulate of essayists. Experienced copywriters know what to write, what to leave out, and how to lay it out so that it does its job of informing clients, fostering trust, and convincing them to buy what you're selling.
Brand design is how your brand looks, whether online or off. Logo, typography, color palette, patterns and illustrations, graphics.
Web design is how your site looks and how the eye moves through it. User experience, layout, type, color, text hierarchy.
Web development is how it works. The build, the coding, the integrations, the performance, the parts that break and need fixing. The level of complexity here depends on the kind of site you're building and what tools and platforms you're using to build it.
Many designers do design and build. Fewer do strategy. Fewer still do copy. A great many require finished copy before they will start, which means the words are up to you unless you hire someone else. Knowing the shape of the market lets you ask better questions. When someone quotes you a number, the first thing to establish is which of these services are included in the quote. There's no right way to combine these services. But these are three common routes.
Hire separately. A strategist, then a copywriter, then a brand or graphic designer, then a web designer or developer. This gets you specialists. It also means you are the project manager: four timelines, four sets of feedback, four relationships, and you sitting in the middle carrying the context between them. Some people are good at this. If you are, it works. It's also the most custom route and the most expensive one. Full-service agencies handle all of these pieces in house, and price accordingly.
Hire for some phases and DIY the others. Considerably less expensive, and a reasonable choice if you write well and know what you want to say. Or if you design well and know how to create the vision you have for your site. The risk is that most people underestimate how hard website copy is, and the project stalls for months as they stare at a blinking cursor and a blank screen. Or the site looks good to visitors, but the back-end is a mess.
Hire one person for the whole arc. I'm biased here, of course, but this is the route I wish had been available to me when I started out. Fewer handoffs, one relationship, and the person who asked you the difficult questions is the same one writing the sentences and choosing the color palette and setting up the SEO. The tradeoff is real: you're trusting one set of hands across skills that are genuinely different, so the vetting matters more.
There is no right or wrong route to choose. The mistake would be to not know you're choosing.
What you're buying:
This is the part everybody needs, but nobody asks about, because people don't know what they don't know. And how would you know? It's not your job, it's mine!
These are the questions you and anyone you hire should be able to answer in advance of any engagement:
Can I update my site myself? Ask directly: after launch, can you change your fees, add a service, swap a photo, or post an announcement without paying anyone to do it for you? While some people happily pay a retainer for this, you should know from the outset what you're getting.
What parts of my site do I own? You should own your domain registration, your hosting account, your analytics, your content, and your logo files, and you should hold the logins. Ask what ownership is transferred at the end and in what form. Ask for the original design files, not only exported images.
What does "done" mean? How many rounds of revisions will you get? What counts as a revision versus a new request? How long will support last after your launch? What happens if something breaks in month four?
Will my site be findable, and will Google be able to read it? Foundational SEO for all websites should include page titles that describe each page and descriptions written for humans, sensible headings and text hierarchy, and on-page SEO, descriptive alt text on images, a sitemap submitted to Google, Google Analytics and Search Console connected, and actually verified. These should be standard, not a separate SEO package.
Will I be able to be found locally? Most people looking for service-providers are looking for one near them, or, when applicable, licensed to practice in their state. A Google Business Profile, consistent naming and address information wherever you appear, and location and licensure stated plainly on the site do most of this work.
Are my legal pages included? A privacy policy is required once your site collects anything, and a contact form or analytics counts. Terms of use and an accessibility statement belong there too. Ask whether the pages are included as part of the build, and separately whether the content is your responsibility. It usually is, and that surprises people.
What about accessibility? Ask specifically how accessibility is handled. An answer should include info about sufficient contrast, real alt text, forms with proper labels, navigation that works by keyboard, visible focus states, text that resizes.
Will my emails go where they are supposed to? Your domain should be set up with authentication records configured so that mail sent from it is trusted. Without them, your contact form confirmations and your invoices can land in spam or vanish.
How will my site look on mobile? Statistically speaking, most people will find you on a phone. Your site should be mobile friendly with images that load quickly, a layout that does not collapse, and tap targets that work with a thumb.
3. Who do you trust to lead you through it?
My rules of thumb for making a choice about who to trust:
Judge the process, not just the pictures. Does this person ask you questions before quoting a number? Does the proposal describe how the work will go, or only what you'll receive at the end? Can they explain a past project in terms of what that client needed rather than what looked good? Lots of people can show you pretty sites. What you want is someone who can explain the thought process behind it.
Read someone’s portfolio for fit rather than beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and, while you may not feel equipped to judge a site’s effectiveness using your taste as a benchmark, you can read a client's About page and then look at their site and ask whether the two are in alignment and whether they seem to be having the intended effect.
Notice how you feel after talking to them. You're going to spend a lot of time with this person discussing your business. If you come out of a first conversation clearer than you went in, that's the single best signal available. If you come out impressed but foggier, that's information too.
4.What it costs
When people learn what it takes and how much it costs to create an intentional online presence for a small business, they are often taken aback. Sticker shock is real, and it looks like a big investment, until you think about how important it is to your business to come across in a polished, professional, and purposeful way your clients will connect with.
Rough market ranges for a solo or small practice, hiring separately:
What you're buying: Typical Price Range:
Brand Strategy $3K and up
Website Copywriting Several hundred dollars per page to 10K and up
Brand Design (logo, color palette, etc.) From a few hundred on Fiverr to $5K
Design/build on an established platform $2-$15K
Template Customization Up to $2500
Ongoing Maintenance/Monthly Retainer Varies widely
Questions to ask, all in one place
Which of these jobs are you quoting for: strategy, copy, brand design, web design, build?
Who writes the words? If I write them, what is the deadline and what happens if I miss it?
What is included for SEO/AIO setup at launch?
Are legal pages built, and is the content mine to supply?
How do you handle accessibility specifically?
Will you configure my domain's email authentication?
What platform, and what will I not be able to do on it in three years?
After launch, what can I change myself?
What exactly do I own and receive at the end, including original files and logins?
How do you handle intake forms and anything touching client information?
Can you connect me with a client you have worked with?
You will not get perfect answers to all of these. What you are listening for is whether the questions are familiar. Someone who has considered them, even imperfectly, is a fundamentally different proposition than someone hearing them for the first time.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between a web designer and a web developer?
A designer decides how your site looks and how someone moves through it. A developer builds the thing that makes it work. On a small business site built on an established platform, the same person often does both, and that's usually fine. The distinction matters more as your site gets more complex. If you need custom functionality, a booking system that talks to your CRM, or anything unusual, you're looking for development skill specifically, and you should ask about it directly rather than assuming it's included.
Do I need a brand strategist and a web designer, or can one person do both?
Plenty of people do both, though fewer than the job titles suggest. The question to ask isn't whether someone offers strategy, it's whether strategy happens before design starts or gets folded in along the way. A site designed first and explained afterward tends to look good and say nothing in particular. If you're hiring separately, budget time for the handoff, because the strategist's thinking has to survive the trip to whoever designs from it.
Should I write my own website copy?
Some people should, and if you write well and know what you want to say, you'll probably do it better than anyone else could. Be honest with yourself about whether you'll finish, though. Unwritten copy is the single most common reason website projects stall, sometimes for a year or more, and a designer waiting on your words is a designer you're paying to wait. If you've been meaning to write your About page for eight months, that's your answer.
Do I need a custom website, or is a template fine?
A well-chosen template is the right answer more often than most designers will admit. If you're early, if your budget is tight, or if you're still figuring out what your business is, a good template will serve you better than a custom site built around an idea that's still moving. Custom becomes worth it when you know exactly who you're for, when you need the site to do something specific that templates don't handle, or when looking like everyone else in your field is actively costing you.
How long does it take to build a website?
This varies enormously from days to months based on what’s included, who you hire, and how they like most to work. Some people offer a website in a day. Some deliver one in a week. Others take up to 8 weeks. The variable is almost never the design. It's the copy and the various other marketing assets, imagery, and elements that need to be complete for a project to be done. Projects where the client writes their own copy routinely run months over, and projects where the copy is handled as part of the engagement tend to land close to estimate. When someone quotes you a timeline, ask what it assumes about who's writing and what other elements they need before they can start.
How do I know if I'm ready to hire someone?
You're ready when you can say what your business does, who it's for, and what you need the site to accomplish. If those are still fuzzy, you're not behind, you're early, and a modest site will hold you until the business tells you what it is. The questions earlier in this post are meant to help you find out which one you are. If most of them come back foggy, wait. The site will be better and cheaper for it.
Not sure what your business website actually needs?
Your consultation call includes an audit of your current brand and website, if you’ve got one and a conversation about what you need. It’s free and takes thirty minutes. We’ll look at what you have, name what you actually need, and make a plan for you to get it, even if it doesn’t include me.