Nine questions worth asking before you sign anything, what a good answer sounds like, and roughly what this costs on the Monterey Peninsula.
Choosing a web designer is difficult because the thing you are buying mostly cannot be seen at the point of sale. Every portfolio looks good. Every firm says the same six words about partnership and process. The decisions that actually determine whether the site earns its money, who owns it, what happens to your search rankings, whether the photography is real, are all buried in places a small business owner has no particular reason to know about.
So this is the list of questions we would ask if we were hiring somebody else. It is written for businesses on the Monterey Peninsula, from Carmel-by-the-Sea, California up through Monterey, Pacific Grove, Seaside and Marina, because some of this is genuinely local: our customers are mostly visitors on phones, our seasons swing hard, and parking is a selling point here in a way it is not in most towns.
A note on who wrote this. We are a design studio in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, so we are not a neutral party and you should read it that way. We have tried to write the version that is useful even if you hire somebody else, because the alternative is a sales page pretending to be a guide, and you would spot that immediately.
Ask who does the work. Many firms sell the project with one person and build it with another, sometimes offshore, and the person who understood your business is not the person writing the code. There is nothing wrong with a team, but you should know who they are before you sign, not after something goes wrong. A good answer names a person. A poor answer talks about "our process" without naming anyone.
This is the question that catches most small businesses here, and it is worth asking in the first conversation. A website is mostly pictures. If photography is not in the quote then either you are paying a photographer separately, usually $800 to $2,000, or the designer builds your site around phone snaps and stock images. Ask plainly: is a shoot included, how many hours, and who owns the files afterwards.
If you already have a website, Google has indexed its pages. Replacing it without redirecting the old addresses to the new ones throws that away, and businesses often find their traffic drops after a redesign for exactly this reason. Ask whether redirects are part of the job. The answer should be yes and it should not be an extra line item. Ask also whether they will set up Google Search Console so somebody is actually watching afterwards.
You should own all three. Some arrangements keep the domain registered to the agency, or build on a proprietary platform you cannot leave, or license the photography rather than selling it. None of that is necessarily dishonest, but you need to know before you commit. Ask: if we part company in two years, what do I walk away with, and what does it cost me to move it elsewhere.
Be honest with yourself about this. A restaurant that changes its menu every week needs to edit it without waiting. A contractor whose site changes twice a year does not, and paying for a content system they never touch is money wasted. Say how often you really expect to make changes, then ask what that costs either way. Both answers are fine. Guessing wrong is expensive.
Ask for a written number before work starts, and ask what is outside it. Common exclusions worth checking: photography, copywriting, hosting, the domain, email migration, ongoing maintenance, and anything described as a "phase two". For reference, small business websites on the Monterey Peninsula generally run from around $3,000 for a simple brochure site to $15,000 and up for multiple locations or e-commerce. A quote far below that range usually means a template with your logo dropped in.
There is no single right answer, and anyone who says there is probably only knows one tool. Hand coded sites load fastest and have nothing to maintain, which suits a business whose site rarely changes. WordPress earns its place when you publish regularly. Shopify makes sense when you sell products. What you want to hear is a reason tied to your business, not to their convenience.
Ask who you call when something breaks at seven on a Friday evening, and what that costs. Ask whether updates, backups and security patches are included or billed. Ask whether they will still be reachable in two years. A local designer who answers the phone is worth a great deal when your reservation button stops working during service.
Not a portfolio of pretty screenshots, but sites you can visit and businesses you could telephone. The Peninsula trades on visitors, and a designer who has built for restaurants here already understands that most of your traffic is someone standing on a street corner with a phone deciding where to eat. Ask for two or three live addresses and look at them on your own phone, on your own network, not on their laptop.
Your visitors are deciding on a phone, outdoors, right now. Someone on Ocean Avenue in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California with twenty minutes to spare, or a family parked on Cannery Row choosing dinner. They are on a weak signal and they will give your site a few seconds. Speed is not a technical nicety here. It is the whole transaction.
You are competing with aggregators, not just the business down the street. Yelp, TripAdvisor and the booking sites outrank almost every independent business for general searches. You will not beat them at "restaurants in Carmel-by-the-Sea". What you can win is your own name, your neighborhood, and the specific questions people ask right before they choose.
The season moves and your site should acknowledge it. Car Week, the AT&T Pro-Am, the Carmel Bach Festival, then the long quiet stretch in January. Peninsula businesses swing between visitors and locals, and what you say to each is not the same.
Say where to park. It sounds trivial and it is not. In Carmel-by-the-Sea and downtown Monterey, parking is a genuine reason people pick one business over another. One clear sentence about parking is worth more than three paragraphs about your philosophy.
If you put those nine questions to us, this is what you would get. Published here so you can compare it against whoever else you are talking to, including people who are not us.
Who builds it: Manny Espinoza, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. The person who designs it is the person who photographs it, builds it, and answers the phone afterwards on 831-236-1998.
Photography: included in every tier, not quoted separately later. Redirects and Search Console: included. Ownership: you own the domain, the files, the photographs and the content, and you can take them elsewhere whenever you like.
Cost: $3,200 for a simple four to eight page site, $4,500 to $7,000 for most mid sized businesses, $7,500 to $15,000 for larger builds. Written number before any work starts.
Work you can go and look at: nine restaurants across the Peninsula, including O'Callaghan's Irish Pub and Enzo Ristorante, plus a realtor on Hartnell Street in Monterey. Open them on your phone, which is where your customers will.
Looking for a website designer near you? We take web design and website redesign projects in each of these communities, and we come to you.