1
If we stop working together, what do I keep?
What a good answer sounds like
A good answer names three things separately: the domain, the content, and the site itself. The domain should be registered in YOUR name with YOUR card, on an account you can log into today - ask them to prove it while they are sitting there. The content - your copy, your photographs - should be yours in writing.
What a vague one costs
The common version of this going wrong is not malice. A designer registers the domain on their own account because it was quicker, then they retire, change business, or stop answering email, and the address customers have been typing for six years belongs to somebody unreachable.
Be sceptical of anyone, including us, who tells you a finished website is fully portable. Content and data usually are. The built site rarely is: a site made on a hosted builder, ours included, does not come out as a working website you can host somewhere else. Webkio exports your data - contacts, orders, bookings, subscribers - and not your pages. Plan for the domain and the content to move, and expect the build to be redone.
2
Who is writing the words?
What a good answer sounds like
Someone should say, out loud, that this is their job or yours. If it is yours, ask when they need it by and in what form, because a half-finished site waiting on your copy is the most common reason a project stalls for months.
What a vague one costs
The usual outcome is a beautiful site launched with placeholder text, or with the three sentences you dashed off at eleven at night. Design is quick to judge and copy is not, so it is the half that quietly gets skipped.
If you are writing it yourself, write the page nobody enjoys first - the one that says what you do and what it costs. Everything else is easier afterwards.
6
Can I see it on my own phone before we launch?
What a good answer sounds like
A link you can open on your phone, during the meeting, on your own network. Not a picture of a phone on a slide.
What a vague one costs
Most of your visitors will arrive on a phone. A design signed off on a large screen can be unusable on a small one, and the first person to notice should not be a customer.
Try it one-handed, outdoors, on mobile data. That is the real test, and it fails more sites than any checklist.
7
Can it take a booking, an order or a deposit?
What a good answer sounds like
If you need that, they should say what it uses, what it costs per transaction, and whose account the money lands in. If you do not need it yet, ask what adding it later would involve.
What a vague one costs
Retrofitting bookings or payments onto a brochure site is often a rebuild, not an addition. This is the question people most often skip and most often regret.
Whoever builds it, insist the money arrives in an account in your name. If payments route through somebody else first, you are relying on them to pass it on.
