A corporate website is one of those decisions a company makes every few years. The cost of getting it wrong lasts about as long: living with a site that loads slowly, cannot be found in search, and needs someone else for every small change.
The ten questions below are for asking yourself and the team you are talking to, before you start collecting quotes. Quotes taken before these answers are settled cannot be compared with each other, because they are not describing the same work.
Goal first, design second
A site is not built to exist. Should the phone ring, should a form arrive, should dealership applications come in? Talking about design before the goal is set is leaving without a route. A good team asks you this in the first meeting; if nobody asks, treat it as a warning.
Once the goal is set, two more questions answer themselves: who will come to the site, and what will that person need in order to decide. The layout is built on those two answers, not on a template.
- Which single measure will tell you this site worked?
- Who is the visitor and what question brings them?
- What bothers you on a competitor site, and what do you find good?
Who will manage the content?
If every price change or new reference means writing to the agency, the site is not really yours. An admin panel that needs no technical knowledge should be standard, handed over with a short training session at delivery.
The second half of the panel question is who produces the content. Put the reasons projects run late in order and technical difficulty is not first: waiting text and unshot photographs are. Who delivers what, and when, belongs in writing from the start.
A site you cannot update from a panel is an asset you rent, not one you own.
Mobile, speed and search
Most web traffic now arrives on a phone. The phrase "mobile friendly" on its own says nothing; ask whether the design started on the phone and expanded to desktop, and open their example work on your own phone.
Speed and search visibility are not added after launch either. Heading structure, structured data, the sitemap and the redirect plan belong in the architecture from day one. If you already have a site, permanently redirecting the old addresses protects the ranking you have built; ask for that line in writing.
Code, accounts and handover
What matters as much as which technology is used is whether the answer can be explained to you. Closed systems that only that team can run make it harder to work with anyone else tomorrow.
Have it written into the contract that the source code, the domain and the server belong to you. It is not a question of trust; it is a clause that changes nothing while the relationship is good and everything if it goes wrong.
Launch day is not the end of the work
Settle whether small fixes, security updates and answers to your questions are inside the quote. Ask as well whether conversion tracking will be set up: without it the site runs, but it runs blind, and next year you will have no data to say which page did the work.
Finally, ask for live sites rather than a client list. Open the addresses on your phone, look at the speed, move through a few pages. A team own site is a reference too; one that neglects its own storefront will neglect yours.
When you find a team that answers these ten clearly, you are on the right track. If you want to talk through your own project in this frame, we can define what you need together in a first call.