How to choose a web designer in Australia

Work out what you actually need first

The most expensive mistake in this process happens before you contact anyone: hiring a designer when you needed a marketer, or a marketer when you needed a developer. Three different jobs get sold under the same word.

• You need a brochure. People already know you, they just want to check you’re real. A template build for $1,000–$2,000 is genuinely the right answer.
• You need enquiries from strangers. The site has to be found and it has to convert. That is a different product, and it starts around $2,500.
• You need something to work differently. Bookings, a portal, an integration with your job management software. That is development, and it is priced by complexity.

Say which of these you are in the first email. It will save you three meetings.

Nine questions to ask every quote

1. “Who will own the domain and hosting?” The only acceptable answer is you. If there is any hesitation here, stop.
2. “What happens if I want to leave in a year?” Listen for whether you can take a working website with you, or just a folder of files nobody else can use.
3. “Who is actually doing the work?” Plenty of Australian agencies sell locally and build offshore. That is not automatically bad, but you should know, and it should be reflected in the price.
4. “What PageSpeed score do you target?” A specific number means they measure it. “It’ll be fast” means they don’t.
5. “How did you decide the page structure?” The right answer mentions keyword research. The wrong answer mentions what looks good.
6. “Who writes the content?” If it’s you, budget your own time honestly — unwritten content is the single biggest cause of stalled website projects.
7. “What is not included?” Ask it directly. Photography, copywriting, ongoing changes and hosting are the usual four.
8. “What does a change cost after launch?” Get the hourly or per-change rate in writing before you commit, not when you need something urgently.
9. “Can I speak to a client from two years ago?” Anyone can produce a happy client from last month. Two years tells you whether the relationship survived.

How to read a portfolio properly

Don’t look at whether the sites are pretty. Do this instead, and it takes four minutes per site:

• Open three of them on your phone. Time how long they take. Try to tap the phone number.
• Run one through PageSpeed Insights. It’s free and it takes thirty seconds. Under 50 on mobile tells you speed is not part of how they work.
• Search for the business by service and city. If a designer’s clients are invisible on Google, the sites are brochures regardless of how they look.
• Check whether the sites are still live. A portfolio full of dead links means clients left and rebuilt elsewhere.
• Look for range. Twelve sites that look like the same template are twelve sales of one product.

Red flags

• They register the domain in their own name. The single biggest trap in this industry.
• Monthly “website subscription” with no ownership. Four years of payments and you own nothing. Read what happens on cancellation.
• Guaranteed page one rankings. Nobody can promise this, and Google says so explicitly.
• A quote with no timeline. Open-ended projects drift for months.
• Pressure to sign today. A discount that expires on Friday is a sales tactic, not a price.
• No written scope. If it isn’t in writing, it isn’t included, and you will find that out at the worst moment.

Green flags

• They ask about your customers before they talk about design.
• They tell you something you don’t want to hear in the first conversation.
• They talk you out of something to save you money.
• Prices, or at least honest ranges, are published.
• They ask what a new customer is worth to you — because that determines what the site should cost.
• The scope, the revision count and the timeline are all written down before money changes hands.

Does the designer need to be local?

Almost never, and this is worth being clear about because we’re remote and we would say that. So here is the honest version.

Everything in a website project happens on a screen. Research, design, code, review, reporting. The one thing proximity genuinely helps with is photography and video, and you should hire a local photographer for that regardless of who builds the site. What proximity actually costs you is an office lease built into the quote.

The real question isn’t distance, it’s responsiveness. Ask how quickly they reply, ask who you message when something breaks at 6pm, and ask the two-years-ago client whether that held up. A designer in your suburb who takes four days to answer an email is worse than one in another state who answers in an hour.

Before you pay a deposit

• Check the ABN on ABN Lookup. It takes ten seconds and tells you how long they’ve been trading.
• Confirm in writing who owns the domain, hosting, files and analytics.
• Confirm the number of revision rounds included.
• Confirm the timeline and what happens if it slips.
• Confirm the post-launch change rate.
• Never pay 100 percent upfront. Fifty percent is the industry norm.