What To Look For When Hiring A Website Designer

What to look for when hiring a website designer

Let's start with an uncomfortable truth: your website won't get you clients on its own.

Creating a beautiful site and waiting for the enquiries to roll in isn't a strategy. The internet is saturated, new websites are almost impossible to find without effort, and without good SEO or an audience already pointing people your way, you're essentially building a lovely shop on a street nobody walks down.

You are the driving force behind your website. The website just needs to be ready when people arrive.

And that part matters. Because when someone does land on your site, you have about 0.2 seconds to make the right impression before they click away. So let's talk about what to actually look for when you hire someone to build it.

Designer, implementer or developer - know the difference

These are often separate skills, and understanding the difference will save you a lot of confusion.

A designer works on the visual side - how your site looks, how it feels, whether it communicates the right thing to the right person instantly. A good designer doesn't just make things pretty, they understand visual communication, which means using colour, typography and layout to speak directly to your audience without a word being read.

An implementer thinks about strategy and solutions. Not just "how does this look" but "how does this work." If you need clients to be able to book appointments, receive files, or move through a journey on your site - an implementer figures out how to make that happen. I work as both designer and implementer, which means I think about your website as a functioning business tool, not just a visual one.

A developer builds bespoke solutions from scratch - custom functionality that doesn't already exist. Most small businesses don't need a developer, especially starting out. But if you want something very specific that no existing platform can handle, that's when you'd bring one in.

Your designer should understand basic SEO

SEO - how you get found in search engines - is a specialism in its own right, and there are experts who do nothing else. But your web designer should understand the fundamentals and make sure the site they build for you isn't invisible to Google from day one. Things like page titles, alt text, site speed and clean structure matter more than most people realise.

Your designer should understand visual communication

There are a lot of talented designers out there. Fewer of them understand that a website isn't a piece of art, it's a communication tool. The colours, fonts, imagery and layout you choose send signals to your audience before they've read a single word. Those signals either say "this is for you" or they don't. Make sure your designer is thinking about that, not just making something that looks nice.

Your designer should understand how people buy

A beautiful website that doesn't convert is just an expensive online brochure. Look for a designer who understands how to structure a page so it guides people toward a decision - clear calls to action, logical flow, the right information in the right order. This doesn't need to be manipulative or pushy. It just needs to make sense.

The best website designers are part designer, part strategist, part translator - turning what you do and why it matters into something a stranger can understand in seconds.

If you're thinking about a new site or a refresh and want to talk it through, please send me a message, I’d love to hear from you.