Seven Questions That Expose a Bad Web Designer

Most people hire a web designer the way they hire a plumber they can't watch work — on vibes, a nice portfolio, and a hope. The difference is you can see when a pipe leaks. A bad website leaks slowly, for months, and by the time you notice, the designer has your domain, your leads are going nowhere, and you don't know the login to anything.

So here are seven questions. Ask them before you sign. The answers sort operators from invoice machines faster than any portfolio.

1. Who will own the domain and the registrar account?

The correct answer is "you do, in your name, with your credit card on file." If the answer is "the agency handles that" or "it's under the agency account for convenience," stop. That's not convenience, that's a leash. A business that doesn't control its own domain doesn't control its own website — it rents access to its own identity. This is the first thing to nail down, and the whole reason who owns your website is a question worth its own answer.

2. Where do form submissions go, exactly?

Not "to your email" — how. What service delivers them, who controls that account, and what happens if it fails. A vague answer means the designer doesn't know, which means the day the form silently stops delivering, nobody's watching. The contact form is where a visitor becomes a lead. If its plumbing is a mystery, you're one broken integration away from losing every inquiry without a single error message.

3. Show me what shipped last month for another client.

Present tense, specific, clickable. An operator can pull up real work — pages published, a rewrite, a fix with a date. An invoice machine changes the subject to strategy and dashboards. Recent shipped work is the single hardest thing to fake, which is exactly why it's the question that works.

4. What happens to my site if you disappear?

Ask it directly and watch the flinch. Can you export the whole site? Do you have the hosting and DNS logins? Is the code somewhere you can reach it? A designer building for your independence answers calmly. One building for your dependence gets uncomfortable, because dependence is the business model.

5. Is your pricing written down before the sales call?

An honest number exists before the sales call. If the price only appears after a "strategy session" designed to figure out how much you'll pay, the price is a function of your desperation, not the work. My floor is published — the $6,000 build floor and $1,500/month retainer are on /studio — precisely so this question has a boring answer.

6. Do you actually work here, or is this a template with a local name on it?

Ask where they're based, who does the work, and whether they've ever driven past your town. A lot of "local web designers" are national template shops with a residency test they fail the moment you ask. There's a whole tell to spotting the fake-local operator, and it starts with whether a human near you is accountable for the result.

7. What ships every month, in nouns?

For any ongoing fee, the answer must be a list of things made — content, rewrites, rankings reviewed, indexing checked. "Ongoing optimization" and "maintenance" are not nouns. If the monthly work can't be named, the monthly work isn't happening.

Here's the part that makes this fair: my answers to all seven are on /studio, in writing, before you ever call me. Compare them freely against whoever else you're considering. I put them out there because the comparison is one I want to have — an operator wins the seven-question test by simply being able to answer it, and the invoice machines can't. Inquire about a project →