What to Prepare Before Hiring a Web Designer

Short answer: before the first call, decide the one thing the site must do, list the pages, set a budget range and a deadline, gather your logo, photos and rough copy, and make sure you control the domain, hosting and analytics accounts. A prepared client gets a first draft in days. An unprepared one waits months while the designer waits for assets.

This guide is for a Singapore business hiring a freelancer, a studio or an agency. The same list applies to all three.

What to decide before the first call

Four decisions shape everything a designer will do. Make them before anyone quotes.

• One goal. The action a visitor should take: book a consultation, request a quote, buy, or send a WhatsApp message. A site with one goal converts better than a site with five.
• The page list. Write the pages you need. For most service businesses that is home, one page per service, about, contact, and a privacy notice. Count them. Quotes are priced by page count.
• A budget range. Published Singapore prices for a 5 to 10 page business site run from about S$2,000 to S$8,000, as collected in cense's website design cost guide. Know which end you are at before the call.
• A deadline. A date, not "soon". A product launch, a trade show, a lease start. Designers schedule against dates.

Two more decisions help:

• Traffic source. Ads, Google search, referrals, or a sales team. A site for ads needs landing pages; a site for search needs one page per service.
• Who approves. One person signs off. Three partners editing copy by email adds weeks.

Assets to gather

Most delays after the first call are waiting for assets. Collect these in one shared folder.

• Logo as SVG or a high-resolution PNG. A JPEG from a name card does not scale.
• Photos of the premises, the team and the work. 10 to 20 real photos beat stock. If you have none, say so, and budget a half-day shoot.
• Rough copy per page. Bullet points on what you do, who it is for, what it costs and what customers ask. The designer or writer turns this into pages.
• Proof. Reviews, client names you may publish, certifications, years in business, numbers you can stand behind.
• Existing content if you have a site: a list of pages and their URLs, and any that bring traffic. Those URLs must be kept or redirected; see redesign without losing rankings.
• Legal text. Your PDPA privacy notice, terms, and any regulator wording your industry requires.
• Brand decisions. Colours and fonts if they exist. If they do not, say so and let the designer propose them.

Access you must control

Three accounts decide whether you own the site. Set them up in your name before anyone builds.

• Domain registrar. The account where the domain is registered. Register it yourself, under your own email, and pay with your own card. Give the designer DNS access only.
• Hosting. Whether Vercel, Google Cloud or a shared host, the account should be yours, with the designer added as a collaborator. A site on the designer's account is held hostage the day the relationship ends.
• Google Analytics and Search Console. Create the properties under your Google account. Add the designer as a user.

Also under your name: the Google Business Profile, the WhatsApp Business number, and any payment account such as Stripe. The website handover checklist lists what to collect at the end of the project; the start of the project is when to make sure it will be yours to collect.

11 checks on a portfolio

A portfolio is evidence. Check it, do not browse it.

1. The site is live. Open the URL. Mockups and screenshots are not proof of a working site.
2. It works on a phone. StatCounter's Singapore figures for September 2026 put mobile at 56.9% of traffic. Open each site on your own phone first.
3. It is fast. Run each site through PageSpeed Insights. Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds are LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds and CLS under 0.1. Check the mobile tab.
4. The designer built it. Ask which sites are original design and which started from a bought template. Both are fine; being told the wrong one is not.
5. It is still maintained. A portfolio site that has been replaced or has broken links tells you about the handover.
6. Titles and descriptions are set. View the page source or use a browser extension. Missing title tags mean SEO was not part of the job.
7. Forms work. Submit a test enquiry on one portfolio site if you can. Ask where the enquiry goes.
8. The sites are in your industry or a similar one. A designer who has built for clinics knows MOH wording rules; one who has built for law firms knows what partners want to see.
9. Variety across clients. Five sites with the same layout and different colours is one design sold five times.
10. HTTPS and security headers. Check the padlock, then run the URL through a header checker. Missing headers are a sign of a plugin-heavy build.
11. Price matches tier. A S$1,500 quote with an enterprise portfolio, or a S$12,000 quote with template sites, needs explaining.

Questions to ask on the call

Ask every candidate the same questions and write the answers down.

• Who owns the code, the domain and the hosting after launch? The answer should be "you", with the accounts in your name.
• What is the fixed price, and what does it include? Pages, copy, photos, forms, SEO setup, analytics, training. Ask what is excluded.
• How many rounds of edits? A number, not "reasonable". cense gives up to 20.
• When does the first draft arrive? A number of days from the call. cense's is 14.
• What happens after launch? Monthly fees, hosting, updates, who fixes a broken form. cense charges S$0 monthly maintenance and S$0 hosting on the standard plan for most business sites.
• Where do enquiries go? Email only is fragile. A database you can open is better.
• What platform, and why? The reason should be about your site, not about what the designer is used to.
• Who writes the copy? If it is you, add two weeks to the timeline.
• What is the migration plan if you have an existing site, and how are old URLs handled?

cense's guide to choosing a web design company in Singapore covers how to score the answers side by side.

Preparation checklist

A client who arrives with this list can expect a first draft inside the timelines in cense's guide to how long a website takes to build. One who arrives without it will spend the first month on this list anyway.

What cense does

cense builds Singapore and Hong Kong business websites from one call: first draft in 14 days, up to 20 rounds of edits, and the domain, code, hosting and data in the client's name. See web design Singapore for what each package includes.