How to choose a web designer in Cornwall
Seven questions that separate a web designer who will grow your business from one who will sell you a template and disappear. A practical guide for Cornish businesses.
To choose a web designer in Cornwall, judge them on five things: whether they build custom or on templates, how fast their sites load, whether you own the result, what it costs to run after launch, and whether they will still be there when you need them. Price matters, but it is the easiest thing to compare and the least likely to tell you whether the site will actually earn its keep. Here is what to look at instead.
Do they build custom, or drop you into a template?
This is the first fork in the road. A designer who builds on WordPress, Wix or Squarespace is assembling your site from parts someone else made. A designer who hand-codes is building it for you. Templates are cheaper and faster on day one and heavier to live with: they slow down, they get hacked through plugins, and they fight you the moment you need something specific. Ask the question directly: is this custom-coded, or a template? The answer tells you most of what you need to know about the next three years.
How fast are the sites they have already built?
Speed is not a detail. More than half of mobile visitors leave a site that takes more than three seconds to load, and Google ranks fast sites higher. You can check any designer’s work yourself: run their existing client sites through Google PageSpeed Insights. A good custom build scores 90-100. A typical template site scores 40-70. If their own portfolio loads slowly, yours will too.
The seven questions to ask
Before you hire anyone, get answers to these:
- Is the site custom-coded or built on a template?
- What does your existing work score on Google PageSpeed?
- Will I own my domain, my hosting and the code?
- What does it cost to run each year after launch?
- Can I see something before I commit any money?
- Who actually does the work, and can I reach them?
- What happens if I want to leave?
A confident, specific answer to each is a good sign. Vagueness, lock-in, or “it depends” on ownership are red flags.
Local matters more than you’d think
A Cornwall-based designer you can phone, or sit down with in Truro, is worth more than a faceless marketplace gig or a city agency that treats a Cornish business as an afterthought. They understand the seasonal, tourism-led, spread-out reality you work in, and they are still there when something needs fixing. There is also a trust signal in it: a local business that has built for other local businesses, with reviews and work you can verify, is a far safer bet than a logo and a stock photo.
A fair way to remove the risk
The best designers will let you see the work before you pay for it. Whealbit builds your homepage live, on a private link, before you have paid anything. You click through the real thing, show your team, and only carry on if you love it. That turns the whole decision around: instead of gambling on a pitch, you judge the actual website. If you would like to see what yours could look like, ask for a free homepage draft.