Five tips on finding the perfect Website Designer

I have inherited a lot of websites over the years. Sites that were handed over half-finished, sites nobody could edit, sites that looked lovely in the proposal and fell apart the first time the business needed something changed. Most of those projects did not fail because the designer lacked talent. They failed because the fit was wrong and nobody checked.

So here is what I would actually look at if I were hiring a designer, knowing what I know from the other side.

Start with the work, but read it properly

Every designer shows you their best portfolio pieces. Look past the screenshots. Click through to the live sites and see how they hold up today. A site that still works two years after launch tells you far more than a polished mockup. Notice whether the sites all look the same, too. If every project looks identical, you are buying their style, not a response to your business.

Ask who does the work

This is the question that saves you the most grief. In larger studios, the person who wins your business is often not the person who builds your site. That is not automatically bad, but you should know before you sign. If the answer involves account managers passing briefs to people you will never meet, expect things to be lost in translation. When you work with me, the person you brief is the person who designs, builds and launches the site. I am not claiming that model suits everyone, but you should always know whose hands your project is actually in.

Talk about what happens after launch

A website is not finished at launch. Content changes, offers change, things break, and the business moves. Ask any designer you are considering what happens in month three when you need a new page or something stops working. If they have no answer, you will be left googling it yourself or paying a stranger to untangle someone else's build.

Make sure you own everything

Domain, hosting, content, design files. All of it should be in your name, in accounts you control. I have seen businesses locked out of their own websites because the relationship with a previous designer soured and everything was registered under the designer's accounts. Ask the question directly and get the answer in writing.

Trust how the conversation feels

You are going to spend weeks working closely with this person. If they talk over you, dodge questions about price, or cannot explain their process in plain language, that is how the whole project will feel. The right designer asks more questions about your business than they answer about fonts.

None of this requires you to know anything about design. It requires you to treat hiring a designer the way you would treat hiring anyone else: look at their work, understand who does what, and pay attention to how they communicate. The rest follows.