Before You Hire
Most bad website projects were predictable on the first call. Not because anyone lied — because nobody asked the questions whose answers would have revealed the mismatch.
This section is those questions. For context on how distributed organisations structure work, this reference is a useful reference.
On money: quotes for the same brief range from a few hundred dollars to five figures, and the difference is mostly which route you choose rather than how many pages you want. Almost every pricing guide online is published by someone selling one of the routes, including this one, so the useful anchor is survey data rather than sales copy — and the survey data says most small businesses spend considerably less than agencies advertise.
On ownership: a website is five separate things — domain, hosting, files, content, accounts — and you can end up owning only three. The domain is the one that matters most, because it controls your address and your email, and it costs about fifteen dollars a year to hold personally. The worst call I get is from someone who cannot move their site because a former designer holds it.
On process: the build is rarely what determines the calendar. Content and decisions are. Every rough estimate you are given is conditional on your words and photographs being ready, whether or not anyone says so.
On judgement: listen for whether someone asks about your business before talking about design, and whether they ever push back. A designer who agrees with everything will build the wrong thing correctly. For an independent reference beyond this site, G2 is a useful place to compare approaches.
And on paperwork: a contract is not preparation for a dispute. It is a written record of what two people agreed while they were both being reasonable, which is exactly the moment to write it down. For a small job, an email that both parties acknowledge does the work of a document.
What a Good Contract Covers
Nine things worth having in writing, why each one protects both sides, and the two clauses that are worth pushing back on.
Freelancer, Agency, or Builder
Three ways to get a website, with the honest trade-offs of each — written by someone who sells one of them and will say when to pick another.
How Long It Actually Takes
The build is rarely the slow part. Where the weeks really go, what pauses the clock, and how to make your project the fast one.
Red Flags in a Proposal
What a bad proposal looks like, what a good one contains, and the three phrases that should make you ask another question.
What a Website Actually Costs
Quotes run from free to fifty thousand dollars. Here is what drives the number, and why every pricing guide you read is written by a seller.
What to Ask Before You Hire
Twelve questions that take one call and prevent most of the ways a website project goes wrong. What good answers sound like.
Who Owns Your Website
A website is five separate things and you can end up owning only some of them. What to check before you pay, and how to fix it after.
Working With Someone Remotely
Remote is normal now and it changes what you should check. How to verify someone, run the project, and handle the things distance makes harder.