How to Commission a Website Without Getting Burned

The problem isn't the price — it's not knowing

Commissioning a website is something you do once every few years. You have nothing to compare it against. Three quotes land in your inbox — £300, £900, £2,200 — and nobody explains where the gap comes from. So you pick on price, and quite often you end up paying a second time to fix it.

What follows is the list of questions to ask before the money moves. Ten minutes of asking saves months of regret.

1. Who writes the words?

This is the gap almost everyone misses. Most quotes cover design and build, but the copy is quietly left to you — "just send us your text." It sounds trivial until you're staring at an empty document. Plenty of sites sit half-finished for six months because the owner never got round to writing the About page.

If the copy isn't in the quote, you're not buying a website. You're buying an empty shell and a homework assignment.

2. What happens after launch?

A website isn't a painting you hang up and forget. Hosting renews, certificates expire, phone numbers change, prices go up. So ask the specifics:

• Who renews the domain and hosting — and on whose card?
• What does it cost to swap one photo or one price?
• If I want a new page next month, what's the rate?
• How fast do you respond if the site goes down on a Saturday night?

3. Who actually owns it?

The domain should be registered to you or your company, not to whoever builds the site. It sounds obvious, and yet it's a classic: two years later you want to move on, and it turns out the address your whole customer base knows you by isn't yours to take.

Ask it plainly: whose name is on the domain, and what happens to it if we part ways?

4. Will anyone actually find me?

"We do SEO" on its own means nothing. Get specific: which searches do you expect to win, and what are you doing to win them? If a garage in Leeds doesn't answer the search "garage in Leeds", it's a business card, not a way of getting customers.

The floor for any site: a distinct title and description per page, address and phone in a machine-readable format, a Google Business Profile, and a load speed that doesn't scare people off.

5. Have you seen it on a phone?

Most people will open your site on a phone — often standing up, outdoors, one-handed. Ask to see it on a real handset before you pay the final instalment. Not a mockup in a slide deck.

How long it really takes

The honest answer: technically, a small business site is days of work. What stretches it into months is almost never the building — it's the waiting. Waiting on copy. Waiting on photos. Waiting on sign-off.

So when someone quotes you three months, ask what specifically takes three months. The answer is usually "your content."

When a template is fine, and when it isn't

There's no shame in a template. For a great many small businesses it's genuinely all you need — what matters is that people find you and understand you in five seconds. Templates run out of road when you need something particular: online booking, a shop, a link to stock software, or a real fight for the same search terms as everyone else.

What to bring to the first conversation

1. Write down what the site is for — calls? bookings? enquiries?
2. Gather the photos you already have. Real ones, of your actual place.
3. Pick three competitor sites you like, and put into words why.
4. Decide your budget for the year, not for today.

With those four things, the conversation gets concrete and the quotes become comparable. For the numbers themselves, see what a website actually costs.

We took the waiting out

WebReady is built against every problem above: we write the copy, domain and hosting are in the price, changes aren't billed by the item, and the site is live in 5 days — because we're not waiting on you to do our job. If that sounds like the conversation you wanted to have, have a look at the plans.