The common story goes like this. A business pays for a website. It takes longer than expected. What arrives looks acceptable but cannot be updated without going back to the developer, who eventually stops replying. Nobody knows who holds the domain. Two years later the business pays somebody else to start again.
Almost none of that is a design problem. It is a briefing problem, and the whole thing is avoidable with a conversation before any money changes hands.
Decide what the website is for
This sounds obvious and it is the step most often skipped. A website that exists to take orders is a different object from one that exists to make a company look established, which is different again from one that exists to generate enquiries.
Write down, in one sentence, what you want a visitor to do. Buy something. Send an enquiry. Message you on WhatsApp. Book a call. Understand what you do well enough to mention you to somebody else. Everything else in the project should be judged against that sentence, and a designer who has it will make better decisions than one who does not.
The questions to settle before you pay anything
Who owns the domain name? It should be registered in your business’s name, on an account you control, with the login in your possession. This is the single most common way Nigerian businesses lose their website, and it is entirely preventable. If a developer offers to register it for you, agree in writing that it is yours and get the account details when it is done.
Who owns the hosting? Same answer, same reason. Paying a developer monthly to host your site means your site exists at their pleasure.
What can you change yourself? Be specific. Can you edit text? Add a product? Change a price? Publish a post? Every one of those you cannot do yourself is a task you will pay for, every time, for as long as the site lives.
What happens after launch? Is there a support period? What does it cover? What is charged? A site with no agreed aftercare is a site that starts decaying the day it goes live.
Who writes the words? A surprising number of projects stall here. Designers generally do not write copy, businesses assume they do, and the site sits at ninety percent complete for months waiting for text.
Will it be found? Building a site and getting it into Google are different jobs, and one does not automatically include the other. Ask directly whether a sitemap will be submitted and the site verified in Search Console. If the answer is vague, that is your job to handle and you should know that now rather than six months later when nobody can find it.
What to give them
The more of this you supply, the faster and cheaper the build.
Your logo in its original file, not a screenshot. Photographs of your actual products, premises or team, taken in decent light, rather than stock images of people in offices that are not yours. The text, or at least the raw facts the text should contain. Your real contact details, including the WhatsApp number you actually answer. A list of the things you sell, as customers would name them rather than as you name them internally. And two or three websites you like, with a sentence each on what you like about them.
That last one saves more time than everything else combined, because it replaces a month of guessing at taste.
Things worth insisting on
It must be fast on a phone on mobile data. Not fast on the designer’s laptop on office fibre. Ask to see it on a normal connection before you sign it off. This is not a detail in Nigeria, it is most of your traffic.
It must say where you are. Your city, in normal sentences, on the pages where it matters. Businesses leave this out constantly and then wonder why local searches never find them.
There must be an obvious way to get in touch on every page. Not only on a contact page somebody has to go looking for.
You get the source files and every account. Domain, hosting, the site itself, any analytics. Written down, handed over, tested before final payment.
On price, honestly
We are not going to give you a figure for somebody else’s work. What is worth understanding is what actually moves the number, because that is what lets you compare two quotes that look different.
The number of pages matters less than people think. What drives cost is whether anything is custom rather than templated, whether somebody is writing your copy, whether photography is included, whether there is an online shop with payments, and how much aftercare is bundled. Two quotes can differ by a factor of five and both be honest, because they are for different things.
Ask for the quote broken into those parts. A quote that cannot be broken down is a price rather than a quote, and you have no way to tell what you are buying.
The last check
Before final payment, open the site on your own phone, on mobile data, logged out. Time how long until you can read something. Try to contact yourself through every route on the page. Search your business name on Google and see whether the new site appears yet. Then ask for every login.
If you would rather have that checked properly, our free deep digital audit does it from the outside, in writing, with the evidence for each finding. It is a reasonable thing to run on a site you have just paid for.
