What to Know Before Hiring a Web Designer in Kent

If you have never commissioned a website before, choosing who builds it is genuinely difficult. Everyone's portfolio looks good. Everyone says they do SEO. Prices range from £300 to £10,000 for what sounds like the same job.

I run a web design studio in Medway and work with businesses across Kent, so I have an obvious interest in what follows. Read it with that in mind and judge the reasoning rather than the source. What I have tried to do is write the guide I wish existed when clients ring me having already been burned once.

Your website is doing more work than you think

For most small businesses, the website is the first impression a customer gets, long before a phone call or a handshake.

Research on this is often misquoted, so here is the honest version: a well-known 2006 study found that people form a visual impression of a page in about 50 milliseconds. That is faster than a blink. The various "x% of people judge credibility on design" statistics that circulate online are mostly misattributed, so I will not lean on them. The point stands without inflated numbers. People decide quickly, and a dated or slow site loses you the enquiry before anyone reads a word.

It also helps to stop thinking of a website as a one-off cost. Every other bit of marketing you do- Google ads, social posts, word of mouth- eventually lands there. A site that works makes everything else you spend work harder.

Where DIY builders genuinely fall short

Wix, Squarespace and WordPress are all capable platforms. For a hobby project or a simple portfolio, building it yourself is a perfectly sensible choice, and I would not pretend otherwise.

Where self-built sites tend to struggle is in three specific places.

Page speed. Google's Core Web Vitals, LCP, INP and CLS, are live ranking factors. DIY templates are usually loaded with unoptimised images and scripts that look fine on a designer's demo and crawl on a real mobile connection.

Mobile-first indexing. Google decides your ranking based on the mobile version of your site, for every searcher. Most people build on a desktop, pick something that looks sharp on a big screen, and assume mobile sorts itself out. It rarely does.

Local keyword structure. AI site builders will produce five pages in ten minutes. What they will not do is know that your customers search "emergency plumber Maidstone" rather than "plumbing services". They produce generic copy with no local strategy, no schema markup and no technical setup.

None of that is beyond learning. It is just not work most business owners have time to do well.

Seven things worth checking before you sign

1. Is the price fixed and published? Vague quoting is the most reliable warning sign in this industry. If nobody will give you a number until you have sat through a call, that is a sales process rather than a pricing model. Our prices start at £900 and are on the website for exactly that reason.

2. Can you see live work? Not screenshots. Real URLs you can open on your own phone and test the speed of. Ask specifically for businesses in your county.

3. Are the reviews independent? Testimonials on someone's own site are unverifiable by design. Google and Wix reviews are not. Volume matters as much as the rating.

4. What platform, and why? The better question is not which platform they use but why they use it, and whether it suits what you need. Anyone who cannot answer that is working from habit.

5. Is SEO in the build or sold separately? A site launched without page titles, heading structure, schema and mobile performance is behind on day one. Ask directly. Some quotes include it, some charge £500 to £1,500 afterwards, and the two can look identical on paper.

6. Will you understand the conversation? You should never finish a call feeling like you need a technical degree. If the first conversation leaves you more confused than when you started, that tells you what the next three months will be like.

7. What happens after launch? Security updates, small edits, someone to ring when something breaks. Confirm what is included and what it costs before you commit, not after.

What it should cost

At the lower end, freelancers on Bark or PeoplePerHour quote £300 to £1,500. Agencies charge £3,000 to £10,000 for what sounds like comparable work. Neither is automatically wrong, but that gap should make you ask what you are actually buying.

Cheap builds usually exclude the same things.

Generic template, no SEO setup, no mobile optimisation, no aftercare. A fair number of businesses end up paying for a rebuild within 18 months, which makes the cheap option the expensive one.

Always ask what is excluded. Hosting, domain, copywriting, photography and post-launch edits are routinely left out of headline prices to make a quote look competitive.

For what it is worth, our own pricing is web design from £900, branding from £350 and SEO from £550, agreed in writing before anything starts. I am not going to pretend that is the cheapest available. It is a fixed number, which is a different and more useful thing.

Design and local SEO are one job, not two

A well-built site with no SEO is a shop with no sign outside. You might be the best in Kent, and Google will still not connect you to the people searching.

What makes local search worth the effort is intent. Someone typing "web designer in Maidstone" or "plumber in Medway" is usually minutes from picking up the phone. They are not browsing.

Most of the groundwork can be built in from the start:

• Page titles and meta descriptions that name the town you actually serve

• A Google Business Profile properly filled in and connected to the site

• Consistent name, address and phone details everywhere online

• Content that genuinely references the areas you work in

There is a technical layer too. Core Web Vitals affect local rankings directly, so a slow site sits below a faster competitor even when the content is better. That is another place professionally built sites tend to win.

Where we fit

I started WebOws Design in 2018 in Medway, so it has been eight years of working almost entirely with small businesses across Kent. That is the honest version of what "local knowledge" buys you: not magic, just a feel for which towns are growing, what the competition looks like, and how people here actually search.

We have 143 five-star reviews on Google and Wix, we hold Wix Legend Partner status, and our prices are published rather than quoted. If any of that is useful to you, have a look at the portfolio or get in touch for a fixed quote with no obligation.

If it is not, the seven questions above still work on whoever you do hire. That is rather the point of writing them down.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a small business website take?

Four to eight weeks from brief to launch is normal. Much faster usually means a template. The most common delay is not the designer; it is waiting on content from the client.

Do I own my website?

You should, and it should say so in writing. Some providers build on proprietary systems you cannot take elsewhere. Get the domain, the content and the site confirmed as yours.

Should I hire someone in my own town?

Not necessarily. Within a county, a designer will have real knowledge of your market. Beyond that, it thins out fast. Competence matters considerably more than the postcode, and a good designer half an hour away beats a mediocre one on your high street.

Is a cheap website ever worth it?

If you need a placeholder, yes. If you need it to bring in work, a £400 site that never appears in search has not saved you money; it has cost you £400 and produced nothing.