Search “web design Glasgow” and you’ll get agencies charging £800 and agencies charging £15,000, all using roughly the same words to describe roughly the same thing. Modern. Responsive. Built to convert. None of it tells you which one will still answer the phone in March.
Most people choosing a web designer have never bought a website before, and they won’t buy another for five years. That’s a hard position to make a good decision from. So here are the questions that actually separate studios, in the order we’d ask them if we were on your side of the table.
1. Who owns the website when it’s finished?
Ask this first, because the answer shapes everything else. Some studios build on proprietary platforms you can never take with you. Leave, and you start again from nothing. Others build on WordPress or similar, hand over the logins, and you keep the lot.
Neither is automatically wrong. A locked platform can be cheaper month to month. Just know which one you’re buying, and get the answer in writing rather than in a sales call. If the person quoting can’t give you a straight answer on ownership, that’s information too.
2. What happens after launch?
A website is not a finished object. Plugins need updating, security patches get released, SSL certificates expire, and content goes stale. Plenty of local businesses are running sites that nobody has touched since the day they launched, which is how you end up with a hacked homepage or a contact form that stopped sending emails eight months ago.
Ask what maintenance looks like, who does it, and what it costs. Then ask what happens if something breaks on a Friday afternoon.
3. Will anyone actually find it?
This is the question people forget, and it’s the expensive one. A beautiful site that appears on page four of Google is a business card you paid four figures for.
Ask whether local SEO is part of the build or an upsell afterwards. Specifically: will they set up your Google Business Profile, will the site have proper page titles and descriptions, will there be pages targeting the searches your customers actually type. In Glasgow that matters more than most people realise, because “plumber Shawlands” and “plumber Glasgow” behave like two different markets.
4. Can I see something they built that isn’t a homepage?
Portfolios are curated, obviously. The useful move is to ask for a site they built that had a constraint: a charity with sensitive subject matter, a shop with 400 products, a client who arrived with no copy and no photos. How a studio handles the awkward parts tells you far more than a row of tidy screenshots.
We built a site for Action Against Stalking, a charity where every word had to be victim-centred and accurate. That job was mostly listening. It’s a better test of a studio than any pretty landing page.
5. How long will it take, and what makes it take longer?
Timelines slip for predictable reasons. Content is the main one. If you haven’t written your service pages and the studio isn’t writing them for you, that’s where three weeks becomes three months.
Ask for a timeline and ask what’s on your plate to hit it. A studio that says “six to eight weeks depending on how fast you get us content” is being more honest with you than one that promises a fixed date without asking a single question about your business.
6. Who am I actually speaking to?
Some agencies sell with a director and build with a subcontractor you never meet. That’s not automatically a problem, but you should know before you sign, because the person who understood your business in the meeting may not be the person writing your copy.
For a small local business, the practical version of this question is simpler. When something needs changing in six months, do you email a support queue or do you message the person who built it?
7. What would they tell me not to do?
This is the one worth saving until last. Anyone selling you something will tell you what you should buy. Far fewer will tell you what you don’t need.
If your current site is structurally fine and just needs better copy and faster loading, a good studio will say so, even though a rebuild pays them more. If you’re a sole trader with three customers a month, you probably don’t need a ten-page site with a blog you’ll never write. A studio that can’t name a single thing you shouldn’t spend money on is selling, not advising.
The pattern underneath all seven
Every one of these questions is really asking the same thing: does this studio think of your website as a deliverable, or as something that has to keep working after they’ve been paid.
That distinction shows up in the quote. Deliverable-thinking produces a fixed scope, a handover, and silence. The alternative costs more attention and usually less money over five years, because the site gets maintained instead of replaced.
You can test for it cheaply. Ask any Glasgow studio you’re considering what success looks like twelve months after launch. If the answer is about the website, keep looking. If it’s about enquiries, calls, or bookings, you’re talking to someone who thinks about the same thing you do.
If you’re working through this list and want a second opinion on your current site, we do a free site review for local businesses. We’ll tell you what’s costing you enquiries and what we’d do about it, and you’re welcome to take that plan to whoever you like.