Hiring
12 Questions to Ask a Web Designer Before You Pay a Deposit
Most South African business owners hire a web designer the same way: get three numbers, pick the middle one, hope. Then eighteen months later they want to change one phone number and discover nobody knows who owns the hosting account. The questions below are the ones that would have caught it — and none of them require you to understand a word of code.
Short answer
Ask who legally owns the domain, hosting and site files; what the quote excludes; who writes the copy; how many revisions are included; what happens the day after launch; and what a small change costs in a year's time. Vague answers to ownership and support questions predict almost every website relationship that ends badly.
What should you ask about ownership and control?
This is the part nobody asks about and everybody regrets. A website is three separate things — the domain name, the hosting, and the files that make up the site. They can each be owned by a different person, and if you are not that person for all three, you do not really have a website. You have a rental with no lease.
1. Will the domain be registered in my name, on an account I can log into? Not "registered for you" — in your name, with your email address as the registrant contact. If your designer registers yourbusiness.co.za under their own registrar account, they control whether your website and your business email keep working. Ask them to send you the login. A straight answer takes ten seconds.
2. Whose hosting account is the site on? Plenty of designers resell hosting, and that is fine — as long as you can leave. Ask directly: "If I move to another provider next year, do I get the files, and is there a fee?"
3. Do I own the design and the code when it's paid for? In South African law, copyright in a commissioned work does not automatically transfer to the person paying for it. Unless your agreement says the work is assigned to you on final payment, the designer may still own it. One sentence in writing fixes this.
4. Will I have admin access to make small changes myself? You do not need to build pages. You do need to change a price, a phone number, or your December hours without waiting three days for someone to reply.
What should you ask about scope and price?
Quotes for what sounds like the same website vary enormously in this market — you can genuinely receive R7,000 and R70,000 for "a website for my business," and neither number is automatically wrong. They are usually quoting two different things. These questions force the difference into the open. (For what the bands actually mean, see our breakdown of what a website costs in South Africa.)
5. What is excluded from this quote? The most useful question on this list. Ask it exactly that way round. Common exclusions that surface: copywriting, photography, logo work, hosting after year one, SSL, email setup, and anything described later as "phase two."
6. Who writes the words? Roughly speaking, if the quote assumes you supply all text, you are buying a layout, not a finished website. Most owners underestimate this badly — writing eight pages about your own business is a weekend of work, and half-finished copy is the single most common reason a build stalls for months.
7. How many revision rounds are included, and what counts as one? "Unlimited revisions" is not generous, it is undefined — and undefined scope is how projects die. Two or three structured rounds with a clear definition beats unlimited vagueness every time.
8. Is this quote fixed, or an estimate? Ask what specifically would cause it to increase.
| What you ask | Weak answer | Answer you want |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns the domain? | "Don't worry, we handle all of that." | "It's in your name. Here's your registrar login." |
| What's excluded? | "Everything you need is included." | A list. Usually copy, photos, and year-two hosting. |
| Who writes the copy? | "You can just send us the text." | "We write it from an interview, you approve it." — or a clear "you supply it," priced accordingly. |
| How many revisions? | "Unlimited." | "Two rounds at design, one after build. Extra rounds billed hourly." |
| When does it go live? | "A few weeks." | A date, plus what they need from you to hit it. |
| What happens if it breaks? | "Just WhatsApp me." | A support arrangement in writing, with a response time. |
Which answers mean you should walk away?
Not every warning sign is dishonesty. Most are simply a designer who is disorganised, over-committed, or about to disappear into a full-time job — which costs you the same amount of time either way.
9. "Can I see two sites you built more than six months ago, and speak to those owners?" Recent clients are still excited. Six-month-old clients know whether the phone got answered when something broke. If a designer cannot produce a single client from last year, ask why.
10. "Have you built for a business like mine?" A designer whose portfolio is all restaurants and boutiques may not know that an electrician's site lives or dies on whether a panicking customer can find a tap-to-call button in three seconds. Sector experience is not essential, but it should show up in the questions they ask you.
Walk away when you get: a demand for 100% payment upfront with no written scope; a quote that arrives as a single WhatsApp number with no breakdown; refusal to put ownership in writing; a portfolio of sites that are all now offline; or pressure to decide today because "the price goes up tomorrow." That last one is a sales tactic, not a deadline.
Be a little careful with the opposite instinct, too. The cheapest quote is not automatically the scam and the most expensive is not automatically the safest. What you are buying is clarity — the quote that tells you the most about what happens is usually from the person who has done this before.
What should you ask about life after launch?
A website is not a painting you hang and forget. Things move: your prices, your team, WhatsApp numbers, Google's requirements, the plugins underneath. The questions almost nobody asks are the ones about month seven.
11. What does a small change cost in a year's time? Get an hourly rate or a retainer figure in writing now, while they still want your business. "We'll sort you out" is not a number.
12. What happens if I can't reach you? Ask what the arrangement is if they are ill, on leave, or simply stop replying. A solo designer is not a risk in itself — most good SA web work comes from one or two people — but you want to know that your files and logins live somewhere you can reach without them.
Two more worth adding if your customers find you on their phones, which in South Africa is nearly all of them: ask how the site is expected to perform on a mid-range Android over patchy mobile data, and ask whether enquiries land in WhatsApp, email, or both. A contact form that quietly fails is worse than no contact form, because you never know what you missed. We wrote about that failure mode in detail in the website setup that actually gets plumbers called.
Finally, ask what happens to your Google Business Profile during the switchover. If your site URL changes and nobody updates the profile, you can lose map pack visibility for weeks — a genuinely expensive own goal covered in our guide to setting up Google Business Profile in South Africa.
Frequently asked questions
Who should own my domain name — me or my web designer?
You should. The domain must be registered in your name, with your email as the registrant contact, on an account you can log into. A designer who registers it under their own account controls whether your website and your email keep working. This is the single most common way South African business owners get held hostage by a previous developer.
Is it normal to pay a deposit for a website in South Africa?
Yes. A 50% deposit with the balance on launch is standard practice for small projects, and larger builds are often split across three or four milestones. What is not normal is paying 100% upfront before you have seen a single design, or paying a deposit with no written scope stating what you get for it.
Should I ask a web designer for references?
Ask for two clients in a similar trade whose sites went live more than six months ago, then phone them. Recent clients are still in the honeymoon phase. Six months in, you find out whether the designer answered the phone when something broke, and whether the site actually produced enquiries.
What should a web designer include in a written quote?
Page count, who writes the copy, who supplies photos, whether hosting and the domain are included and for how long, revision rounds, the launch date, and what post-launch support costs. If any of those six are missing, the quote is not comparable to any other quote you receive.
Ask us all twelve.
Tell us what your business does and we'll come back with a written scope — page count, who writes what, what's excluded, and a launch date. No obligation, and you keep the answers whoever you end up hiring.
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