A first conversation about a new website follows a familiar shape. After a few minutes the questions arrive, and they are usually the same five: how long will it take, what does it cost, what is included, will it bring me more enquiries, and which system do you work in.
Those five are the right questions. You have a budget, a date in mind, and you want to put two or three offers side by side at the end. That is exactly what they are for, and they do it.
What stands out is how rarely three other questions come up. They decide whether the finished website really belongs to you and whether it does anything for the business once it is live, and the offers we get to see have no line for them. This piece puts them next to the usual five, so you have both sets in your head the next time you pick up the phone.
What the usual five answer, and what they leave open
| Your question | What it tells you | What it leaves open |
|---|---|---|
| How long will it take? | When the site goes live | Who looks after it afterwards, when something changes |
| What does it cost? | The price of the build | What running it costs, and what moving later would involve |
| What is included? | The scope of the offer | Whether that scope matches what the site is supposed to do |
| Will it bring more enquiries? | Whether the provider thinks in enquiries at all | How the two of you would tell that it worked |
| Which system do you use? | What you will be working in day to day | Who owns the accounts behind that system |
The right-hand column has a pattern. Everything left open concerns the time after launch. An offer describes a build, and a build finishes. Your website then runs for years, and those years hold the decisions that either bother you later or never do.
The three questions an offer comparison does not cover
They sit alongside the five above and settle the part no offer describes.
Where does the domain live, and whose name is it registered in?
The domain is the one piece that travels with you. You can replace the design, the content, and the technology completely in five years, and your address on the internet stays the same. It sits with a company, it is registered in someone’s name, and once a year the renewal comes off somebody’s card.
Three short follow-ups settle it:
- Which company is the domain registered with, and can I log in there myself?
- Whose name is on the registration, my business or the provider?
- Which card pays the annual renewal?
The answers take two minutes and change nothing about the price of the project. What they change is how easily you can move in three years, if you ever want to. A move runs through the transfer code, and that goes to whoever is listed as the registrant. If that is not your business, your move waits on someone else’s reply. How domains, DNS, and email fit together, and why keeping them separate matters, is laid out in our guide to DNS, domains, and email.
Who has access, and to what exactly?
A website is not a single login. Behind it sit the domain, the DNS, the hosting, the editing system, the mailboxes, the analytics, and the place your enquiry forms land. Those accounts get created over years, one after another, each at a moment when it made perfect sense. That list often does not exist anywhere, because there was never a standard shape for one.
Ask for that list at the start, and ask who holds which account. There is a simple rule underneath it. The accounts belong to your business, and the provider gets a role inside them. Which accounts are actually part of the set, and who should hold each one, is written out in full in Who Actually Has Access to Your Website?.
What should the website achieve, beyond looking good?
This is the awkward one of the three, because there is no form field for it. Looking good is a real goal. It is just not a complete one. A site that looks good and leaves open what is supposed to happen on it is hard to judge afterwards. Nobody can say whether it works, because nobody agreed what working would look like.
The question gets easier if you turn it around: what does a good week on your website look like? For one business that is five enquiries through the form. For the next it is twenty fewer phone calls, because the opening hours and the prices finally sit where people look for them. For a company that badly needs staff, it is two usable applications.
Once that answer exists, a lot of the rest decides itself. The homepage gets a job, so does the contact form, and your provider can tell you what they will build for it and what they will leave out.
Why these three have no line in the offer
This has little to do with carelessness. The usual five are the language the market hands you. They appear in almost every offer, and they can be laid side by side. The other three describe a state that only arrives after launch. There is no line in the offer for that and no price to pin it to.
If a domain is registered in the provider’s name, that provider has little reason to raise the subject unprompted. It is rarely meant badly. It simply does not occur to anyone in the day to day.
A good provider brings them up unprompted
This is the real point, and it takes work off your plate. You do not have to carry this checklist around. When someone explains, in the first conversation and without being asked, where your domain will live, who gets which account, and what the site is meant to achieve, that tells you more about the coming years than any feature list. It is one of the clearest signals in the whole conversation, and the other signals worth watching are in how to tell if a web provider is good.
We bring these points up ourselves in the first conversation. It is mostly a matter of tone. Asking about price and timeline first is not a mistake, and the three questions simply join them. They are quickly settled, and both sides have an easier time afterwards.
If they do not come from the other side, you have them now, in a form that sounds like an ordinary follow-up in a conversation:
- Whose name is my domain registered in, and which company is it with?
- Which accounts make up my website, and who holds them?
- How will we tell, a year from now, whether the site is doing its job?
Price and timeline describe only the build
Price and timeline stay important, and nothing here changes that. They describe the build, and the three questions above describe the years that follow. We settle these points at the start, if only because we are still living with the same site years later. If the ownership part is what sits on your mind, Who Owns Your Website on a Subscription? takes that worry head on, and our plans show how the running side is set up.