Working with a studio · 2 min read
What to Ask Before You Hire Someone to Build Your Site
The proposal should tell you who does the work, what you will own, and what happens to an enquiry after launch.
Who actually builds it
A lot of agency work is sold by one person and built by another team you never meet. The brief gets thinner each time it is passed along, and the finished site no longer matches the conversation you paid for.
Ask, in the first call, who will design it and who will write the code. If the answer is a rotating bench, decide whether you are comfortable with that. At A&S the founder stays on the work. There is no separate account-manager layer between you and the build.
What you own when it is done
A cheap template can look acceptable and still lock you in. You may not be able to move the site, change the form, or hand it to another developer without starting over.
Ask what you receive: the code, the content, the domain, and the hosting login. Ask what happens if you stop working together. A serious studio can answer that without getting vague.
Custom work costs more thought than a theme, and we do not list public prices, because the number depends on the pages, the form, and the tools it has to talk to. The quote should come after the scope is clear, not before anyone has asked how you get customers.
How an enquiry will be handled
Launch day is not the finish if the new form dumps messages into an inbox nobody watches. Ask where a lead goes, who is notified, and what happens if that person is busy.
If the answer is only “you will get an email,” decide whether email is really how your team works. If the team lives on WhatsApp, the site should meet them there.
What the first week after launch looks like
A site that has never met a real visitor will have rough edges: a sentence that confuses people, a button that is hard to tap, a page that is slower than it was in the preview.
Ask what is included after go-live. Watching the first real enquiries and tightening the page is part of the job, not a surprise invoice, when that was agreed up front.
If a studio cannot explain the first month in plain language, they are selling a handover, not a working site.
If this matches a problem you are already dealing with, tell us what is happening and we will say what we would look at first.