What to Look for When Hiring a Web Designer

Most people hire a web designer the same way they’d hire a decorator: look at pictures, pick someone whose taste matches theirs, agree on a price. This approach produces a lot of websites that look good in a portfolio and don’t do much else.

Hiring well is harder than that. Here’s how to do it.

Look at the Work Behind the Work

A portfolio shows you results. What you actually need to understand is process. Before you evaluate anyone’s work, ask: what was the brief? What problem were they solving? What were the constraints?

A designer who can answer those questions with specificity — “the client was struggling to explain their pricing tiers, so we restructured the services page around the customer’s decision journey rather than the business’s org chart” — is worth ten times the one who just shows you pretty screenshots.

If a designer can’t tell you what problem the design solved, they probably didn’t solve it intentionally. They got lucky, or they optimized for aesthetics rather than outcomes. Lucky and decorative are both expensive mistakes.

References Matter More Than Reviews

A five-star review on Google or a testimonial on a website tells you the client was happy at the end. What you want to know is what the process was like in the middle — when a revision was needed, when a deadline was at risk, when something unexpected came up.

Ask for references you can actually call. Then ask those references: what went wrong, and how did the designer handle it? Every project hits something unexpected. The signal is not whether problems occurred — it’s whether the designer communicated clearly, took responsibility, and resolved them without drama.

Understand What You’re Actually Buying

Web design is a bundled service and most people don’t know what’s in the bundle. When you hire someone, are you getting strategy? Copywriting? Photography? Development? SEO? CMS training? Post-launch support?

Get this in writing. Not because designers are dishonest, but because assumptions are expensive. “I’ll handle the copy” means different things to different people. Some designers will write first drafts; others will lay out whatever you send them and call it done.

The best designers will tell you exactly what they do and don’t cover, and point you toward the right people for the gaps. The warning sign is vagueness — a scope of work that sounds comprehensive but doesn’t actually specify deliverables.

Price Is a Data Point, Not a Decision

The cheapest option is almost never the best value, and the most expensive option is not automatically the safest. Price tells you something about where a designer is positioned in the market, but it doesn’t tell you if they’re good at what they do.

What you should care about is return on investment. A $4,000 website that generates $40,000 in new business in its first year is free. A $500 website that you’re embarrassed to send to prospects costs you clients you can’t count.

If you don’t know what a good website is worth to your business, stop and figure that out before you start talking to designers. It will make every subsequent conversation clearer.

Alignment on Priorities

The best working relationships happen when client and designer agree not just on what the site should look like, but on what success means. “More enquiries” is not a specific enough goal. How many? From which customer type? What does an enquiry that converts to a client look like?

A designer who asks these questions before showing you a single mockup is one who will make better decisions throughout the project — because they’ll have a clear standard to measure their choices against. A designer who goes straight to visuals is one who’s designing for approval rather than outcomes.

That distinction — approval vs. outcomes — is the most useful thing I can offer you. Find someone who optimizes for outcomes. Everything else follows from there.