How to choose a web design company (12 questions to ask)

Choose a web design company based on the answers it gives to twelve ownership and process questions, not on how good its portfolio looks. Anyone can show you attractive screenshots. Far fewer will tell you in writing who owns your domain, what happens to your Google rankings on launch day, and what your total cost is in the first twelve months.

I have been building websites in Minnesota for 14 years, and most of the rescue jobs that land on my desk are not design problems. They are ownership problems, handoff problems, and “the person who built it stopped answering email” problems. A charter school in St. Paul cannot update its own lunch menu. A home care agency in Bloomington discovers its domain is registered to a former contractor. A nonprofit relaunches and loses every inbound link to its donation page because nobody wrote a redirect map.

None of that is visible in a portfolio. All of it is visible in the answers below.

What actually goes wrong when you pick the wrong web design company?

Bad websites are rarely the problem. Stranded websites are.

The four failure modes I see over and over: you cannot edit your own content, so the site goes stale within a year. You cannot leave, because the platform is proprietary or the accounts are in someone else’s name. You lost search traffic at launch and nobody noticed for four months. Or the total cost turned out to be double the quote once hosting, content, photography, and a mandatory care plan were added.

Every one of those is preventable with a question asked before you sign.

The 12 questions to ask before you hire

Ask these in a call, then ask for the important answers in the proposal. A company that answers well verbally and vaguely in writing has told you something.

1. Who owns the domain, hosting, code, and design files when we are done?

The answer you want: you do, all four, in accounts registered under your organization’s name and email. Your domain should sit in a registrar account you control. Your hosting should be in your name with your credit card or your organization’s. You should receive the site files and the layered design source files, not just flattened images.

The answer that should worry you: “We handle all that for you, don’t worry about it.” That is convenience talking, and it becomes a hostage situation the day you want to leave. If you are not sure what you currently own, our guide on how to check whether you actually own your website walks through the four accounts to verify.

2. Can I edit the site myself, and what exactly can I edit?

You want a specific list: pages, staff bios, events, blog posts, hours, PDFs. And you want a training session recorded, plus written documentation you keep.

The worrying answer is either extreme. “You can edit everything” often means you have been handed a page builder with 40 settings per block, and one wrong click breaks the layout. “You have to email us for changes” means every typo costs you a support ticket and a fee. The right setup gives non-technical staff safe control over the content that changes often, and locks the structure that should not change.

3. What happens to my Google rankings when this launches?

The answer you want names specifics: we keep your existing URLs where possible, we 301-redirect the ones that change, we preserve page titles and headings on pages that already rank, and we compare Search Console data 30 and 90 days after launch.

If the answer is “SEO is a separate service” or “rankings always dip after a redesign, that’s normal,” push back. Rankings do sometimes wobble for a couple of weeks. A permanent 50% traffic drop is not normal, it is a botched migration. We cover the mechanics in moving your website to a new platform without losing rankings.

4. Is there a redirect map, and can I see it before launch?

This is question three with teeth. A redirect map is a spreadsheet with every old URL in one column and its new destination in the other. It should exist before launch day, and you should be allowed to look at it.

No redirect map is the single most common cause of a rankings collapse after a relaunch. If a vendor does not know what you mean by the term, that is your answer.

5. Who writes the content?

You want this stated in the proposal in plain words: “client provides copy for all pages” or “TayoPro writes copy for 8 pages based on interviews.” There is no wrong answer, but there is a wrong assumption.

Content is where most projects stall. I have watched a four-week build sit for five months because nobody at the organization had time to write staff bios. If you know your team will not produce copy, pay someone to do it, and put that in the scope up front rather than discovering the gap in week three.

6. What is not included?

Ask it exactly that way. A good vendor will list exclusions without flinching: stock photography, professional photo shoots, logo design, copywriting, translations, ongoing SEO, third-party software licenses, email hosting, and post-launch changes beyond a stated revision window.

A vendor who says “everything is included” has either not read your project or is planning to define “everything” narrowly later.

7. What is my total cost in the first 12 months?

Not the build price. The build price plus hosting, plus domain renewal, plus any care plan, plus any license fees, plus the average cost of the changes you will realistically ask for.

Here is what those pieces typically run, using our own published pricing as the reference point:

Line item	Typical range	Notes
Starter website (5-8 pages)	$1,800-$3,500	2-4 weeks
Business website	$3,500-$9,000	4-8 weeks, most small organizations land here
Advanced website	$9,000-$25,000	8-16 weeks, custom functionality or large content sets
Website redesign	$2,500-$12,000	Depends on how much content is migrating
Online store	$3,500-$20,000	Catalog size and integrations drive the number
Hosting	$10-$50/mo	Billed by the host, not the designer
Domain renewal	$12-$25/yr	Yours, in your registrar account
Care plan (optional)	$75-$600/mo	Updates, backups, security, small edits
Hourly work after launch	$95-$150/hr	For anything outside a care plan

A $4,000 site with a $200/month care plan is a $6,400 first year. That is a fine deal if the care plan is doing real work. It is a bad deal if it is $200 a month for automated plugin updates. Ask what the plan actually includes, in hours and tasks.

8. Who will I actually talk to during the project?

You want a name, and you want that person to be in the meeting where you ask this question.

At a large agency, the person who pitched you is frequently not the person who builds your site, and sometimes not even the person who emails you afterward. That is not automatically bad, but you should know it going in. At a small studio, the answer should be simple: you talk to the person building it. On our projects that is me, and you can see who I am and how I work before you commit to anything.

9. What is your process if we disagree about the design?

A good answer sounds structural: we present two directions, you pick one, we do two rounds of revisions inside the scope, and additional rounds are billed hourly at a stated rate.

The bad answer is “we just keep going until you’re happy.” That sounds generous and it is how projects die. Unlimited revisions with no decision process means the loudest board member gets the site, the timeline triples, and both sides end up resentful. Structured disagreement is a feature.

10. What happens if we stop working together?

The answer you want is boring: you keep everything, we transfer the accounts within a stated number of business days, and there is no fee to leave.

Ask specifically whether there is a termination fee, a minimum contract term, and whether the site keeps functioning if the care plan lapses. On a normal build, the site should keep serving pages forever with no updates; you simply stop getting security patches and support. If it stops working entirely, you were renting.

11. Can I see three sites you built three or more years ago that are still live?

This is my favorite question and almost nobody asks it. A portfolio shows launch-day screenshots. Three-year-old live sites show whether the work survived contact with a real organization.

Click through them. Is the content current or frozen in 2022? Does the site still load fast? Did the organization keep it, or quietly move to something else? Then email one of those clients directly, not a reference the vendor hand-picked. Our project archive lists real client sites you can open in a new tab and judge for yourself.

12. Do you build accessibly, and how do you check?

The answer you want names a standard and a method: WCAG 2.1 Level AA, keyboard navigation tested, color contrast checked, real alt text, headings in order, forms with labels.

This matters legally for some of you. The Justice Department’s 2024 Title II rule sets WCAG 2.1 Level AA for state and local government entities, which includes public school districts and Minnesota charter schools, with compliance dates in April 2026 and April 2027 depending on entity size. It matters practically for all of you: WebAIM’s annual scan of a million home pages has found detectable accessibility failures on the overwhelming majority of them, every year it has run. If you serve seniors, people with disabilities, or families navigating services, an inaccessible site is turning away exactly the people you exist for. More detail in our website accessibility guide for small organizations.

What are the red flags?

Some of these are dealbreakers. Some just mean read the contract twice.

What you see	What it usually means	What to do
Mandatory 24-36 month contract	The monthly fee, not the build, is the product	Walk, unless the fee is genuinely low and the exit terms are clean
Proprietary platform you cannot export	You can never leave without rebuilding	Walk
“Guaranteed #1 on Google”	Nobody can promise this; Google’s own guidance on hiring SEO help warns against it	Walk
No written scope, just a price	Every disagreement later is your word against theirs	Ask for a scope document before paying anything
Refuses to name any price range	The number gets discovered later, upward	Ask for a range; a hard refusal is disqualifying
“Free website” with a monthly fee	You are financing a site you will never own	Read the ownership and termination clauses very carefully
100% payment up front	Unusual for a project of any size	Standard is 50% to start and 50% at launch
Portfolio full of sites you cannot open	The links are dead because the clients left	Ask for three live sites over three years old
Cannot explain what happens to your rankings	They have not done a migration before	Only hire them for a brand-new site, not a redesign

One nuance on the long-contract flag. A $99/month “website plus hosting plus support” bundle from a reputable local provider can be a reasonable deal for a five-page site if you can cancel with 30 days’ notice and take your domain. The same $99/month on a 36-month lock, on a platform with no export, is a $3,564 rental of something you could have bought outright.

Freelancer, small studio, or large agency?

There is no universally correct answer. There is a correct answer for your project size, your internal capacity, and your tolerance for risk.

	Freelancer	Small studio	Large agency
Typical project range	$800-$6,000	$3,500-$60,000	$50,000+
Who you talk to	The person doing the work	The person doing the work	An account manager
Speed on small changes	Fastest	Fast	Slowest
Risk if they get sick or quit	High, single point of failure	Moderate	Low
Strategy and content help	Varies wildly	Usually included	Deep, and priced accordingly
Handles multi-stakeholder review	Rarely well	Usually	Built for it
Procurement, RFPs, insurance certs	Often cannot	Usually can	Always can
Post-launch support in year three	Coin flip	Reasonable odds	Contractual
Best fit	One clear project, decisive client	Small business, nonprofit, school, clinic	Enterprise, multi-brand, national campaigns

Freelancers get unfairly maligned by agencies, mine included. A good freelance designer with five years of steady clients will do excellent work on a well-defined project, often faster and for less. The real risk is not skill, it is continuity: one person gets a full-time job offer, moves, or has a baby, and your site has no maintainer. Mitigate it by owning every account yourself and using a mainstream platform, so anyone can pick it up.

Large agencies earn their price when you have eight stakeholders, a legal review, a brand system to enforce, and a budget that makes a dedicated project manager rational. If your project is a 12-page site for a Twin Cities nonprofit, an agency built for national retail clients will assign you their most junior team and still charge you agency rates.

When you should not hire us, or any agency

I would rather tell you this now than take a project that makes both of us unhappy.

If your budget is under about $1,500 and you need five straightforward pages, use Squarespace or Wix yourself. Seriously. At that budget no agency can give you strategy, custom design, and content, so you would be buying a rushed template with your logo dropped in. You can do that yourself in a weekend for $200 a year and spend the difference on photography, which will improve the site more than we would. We wrote the honest version of this comparison in build it yourself or hire someone and in AI website builders vs hiring an agency.

If your site is fine and your problem is that nobody can find you, do not buy a redesign. Buy local SEO work, or fix your Google Business Profile yourself for free. I have talked several Minneapolis and Burnsville businesses out of $8,000 rebuilds when the actual issue was a business profile with the wrong hours and no photos.

If you need one landing page for one campaign, hire a freelancer. Our minimum engagement does not make sense for that, and a good freelancer will do it faster.

If you are a national brand needing 200 pages, six languages, and a 24/7 SLA, hire a bigger firm. We are one studio in Edina with a real capacity limit, and I would rather say so than overpromise.

How do I check references without wasting everyone’s time?

Ask the vendor for three clients. Then find two more yourself from their portfolio that they did not offer. Email the ones you found.

Ask those clients four things: Did it launch on the promised date, and if not, why? What did the final invoice total compared to the quote? How long does it take to get a response now that the project is over? Would you hire them again for the next project?

That fourth question does most of the work. People are polite in writing until you ask them to commit to doing it again.

A simple way to run the decision

Get three proposals. Not one, and not eight.

Score each on ownership, clarity of scope, total first-year cost, who you will actually talk to, and evidence of work that lasted. Price should be the fourth or fifth factor, not the first, because the gap between a $4,000 site and a $7,000 site is almost always the strategy and content work, and that is the part that determines whether the site produces anything.

If you are a nonprofit running a formal process, our nonprofit website RFP template turns these questions into a document you can send out. If you are earlier than that and just want to know what things cost around here, start with how much a website costs in Minnesota.

Talk it through

If you want a second opinion on a proposal you have already received, send it over. I will tell you what I would ask the vendor, even if the answer is that their proposal looks better than what I would write.

If you would rather just have a conversation about your project, get in touch or call (612) 293-0636. We are in Edina and work with organizations across the Twin Cities and greater Minnesota.