How to choose a web designer in Dorset.

Judge the work, not the pitch

Every web designer's own site looks good. That's the one site they had unlimited time and no client interfering with. It tells you almost nothing about what you'll get.

What tells you something is their clients' sites, live, today. Pick two from their portfolio and check:

• Does it still exist? Portfolios quietly fill up with dead links and businesses that moved on. A portfolio where half the sites 404 is a portfolio of former clients.
• How fast does it load on your phone? On mobile data, not office wifi. Over about three seconds and you're looking at a build that will cost the client customers.
• Does it rank for anything? Search the client's service and town. If none of their clients appear for the obvious searches, the sites are brochures, not lead sources.
• Can you tell what the business does within five seconds? If not, the designer prioritised looking clever over being clear.

Ten questions worth asking

Ask these of anyone quoting you. The answers matter more than the price, and the way they're answered tells you as much as the content.

1. Whose name will the domain be registered in? It should be yours, or transferable to you on request without argument. This is the most common way small businesses end up stuck.
2. What happens if we part ways? A straight answer tells you how the relationship will go. Evasion here is disqualifying.
3. Can the site be moved to another host or developer? Some platforms are deliberately hard to leave.
4. Who writes the content? The most underestimated part of every project. If it's you, expect it to take longer than you think. If it's them, check it's in the quote.
5. What's included in the price, and what isn't? Get the boundary in writing. "Extra pages" and "revisions" are where quotes quietly grow.
6. What does it cost to change something next year? Ask for the hourly rate now, not when you need it.
7. What happens about hosting and updates? A heavy plugin-based build needs ongoing maintenance. A light one needs much less. This changes the three-year cost more than the build price does.
8. Will it be built to be found, or just to exist? Ask specifically about page structure, schema markup and speed, not just "do you do SEO".
9. Have you thought about AI search? A growing share of people ask an assistant for a recommendation rather than searching. Most designers haven't considered it at all, and the honest ones will say so.
10. Who will I actually be dealing with? At larger agencies the person selling is rarely the person building. Worth knowing before, not after.

Red flags

That "cheap monthly" one deserves expanding, because it catches a lot of small businesses. A site for £40 a month with nothing up front sounds reasonable until you notice it's a five-year commitment, you never own the site, and leaving means starting again. Over five years that's £2,400 for something you can't take with you.

Does local actually matter?

Partly, and it's worth being precise about which parts.

For building the site: not much. The work happens the same way whether someone is in Poole or Manchester. Anyone claiming you need a local designer for the build itself is selling proximity rather than skill.

For local SEO: genuinely, yes. Someone who knows Dorset knows that Bournemouth and Poole share search results, that a trade in Winton competes with one in Parkstone, and how far people will realistically travel for a given job. That knowledge is the difference between targeting "Dorset" as a word and targeting what your customers actually type. It's hard to fake from a distance.

For getting the project finished: more than you'd expect. Most projects stall on content, not design. Being able to sit down for an hour and go through it together tends to unblock that faster than a fortnight of emails.

What it should cost

Rough Dorset expectations, consistent with the wider UK market:

Below about £500 you're generally buying a template with your logo dropped in. Above about £5,000 for a small business, ask hard what the extra buys. Often it's complexity you don't need. There's a fuller breakdown, including the ongoing costs nobody mentions, in our guide to what a website costs.

When a small studio is the wrong choice

We're a small studio, so treat this section with appropriate suspicion. But it's worth saying plainly, because the honest answer isn't always "hire someone like us."

Go to an agency if: you need several specialists working at once, you need guaranteed cover during holidays and illness, you're running a large ongoing programme of work, or you have procurement requirements a small firm can't satisfy.

Go to a freelancer if: you need something simple, you're on a genuinely tight budget, and being found in search isn't a priority yet.

Do it yourself if: you're testing whether a business idea works at all. A site builder for a few hundred a year is a perfectly sensible way to find out before spending properly.

A small studio makes sense if: you want the person doing the work to be the person you talk to, you want the site to bring in enquiries rather than just exist, and you'd rather have one accountable party than a rotating cast.

The short version

Check their clients' sites on your phone. Ask who owns the domain. Get the price in writing before anything starts. Make sure whoever builds it has thought about how you'll be found: in Google and, increasingly, in the AI tools people ask instead.

And if someone guarantees you the top spot on Google, thank them for their time and leave.

If you'd like a straight opinion on a quote you've been given, including whether it's fair, send it over. We'll tell you what we think even if the answer is that you should take it.