What goes wrong when you hire a bad web designer?
The site usually looks fine. What goes wrong when you hire a bad web designer is all underneath it: you do not own the code, somebody else holds your domain, enquiries stop arriving and nobody notices, and every small change costs money because there is no way to edit anything yourself.
That is the pattern, and it turns up months after the last invoice is paid. By then the person who built it has moved on, the login was never handed over, and a change of opening hours needs a support ticket.
Here is what it looks like when it is measured rather than argued about. A site we audited on 18 August 2026 came back with 48 separate findings. Six were raw image tags with the checking rule switched off in five files to hide them. Five pages skipped a heading level. One page title ran to 71 characters with the business name printed twice in it. A free email address appeared on all fifteen pages. A different site audited on 8 August 2026 had no sitemap at all, no description on any of its eleven pages, no main heading on any page, and two pages sharing a single title.
None of that is visible looking at the site. All of it decides whether anybody finds it.
Do I own my website if I paid somebody to build it?
Paying for a website does not, on its own, make you the owner of it. Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 11, the author of a work is the first owner of the copyright in it, and the only exception the section makes is for something written by an employee in the course of their employment. Commissioning is not mentioned anywhere in it.
So the person who wrote the code owns the code, unless they have signed it over. Section 90 of the same Act is blunt about how that has to happen: "An assignment of copyright is not effective unless it is in writing signed by or on behalf of the assignor."
Most owners find this out at the worst possible moment, which is the day they want to leave. Get it in the contract before you pay anything: the code, the design and the words become yours in writing when the final invoice is settled.
Ownership of the accounts matters just as much and is easier to check. The domain, the hosting, the Google Business Profile and the analytics should all be registered in your business name with you holding the main login. A domain registered inside somebody else's account is legally theirs, whatever the invoice says.
This is a description of what the Act says, not legal advice. If real money is involved, pay a solicitor for an hour.
Can a web designer stop me moving somewhere else?
Yes, and usually through one of three things rather than a threat. The site is built on software only they can run. The plugins that make it work are licensed to their account and switch off when you stop paying them. Or the domain is registered in their name, so they decide where your web address points.
Reputable people help you move and hand everything over. The problem is that you cannot tell the difference at the quoting stage, which is why the questions at the bottom of this page are worth asking before you sign rather than after.
The quick test you can do today: log in to your domain registrar and your hosting yourself, without asking anybody. If you cannot, that is the answer.
Can ChatGPT and Google's AI actually read my website?
Often not, and it is one of the newer things that goes wrong quietly. Three faults do it, all of them put there by whoever built the site, and none of them shows any symptom you would notice.
The first is a file called robots.txt sitting on your own server, which tells each crawler what it may look at. Plenty of sites are telling GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot to stay off the whole site. That is usually done to keep the site out of AI training, and it takes the business out of the recommendations at the same time.
The second is a single tag in the head of a page. Microsoft's own webmaster guidelines say that noarchive "prevents content from being used in Copilot responses and grounding results". The page carries on indexing and carries on ranking, so nothing looks wrong at all. It is simply never quoted.
The third is the enquiry form. Google's AI optimisation guide says browser agents doing jobs for people work by "inspecting the DOM structure, and interpreting the accessibility tree". In plain words, an assistant filling in your form reads it the way a blind customer's screen reader does. A box labelled only by the grey writing inside it defeats both of them.
What is worth knowing is that there is no separate AI package to buy. Google's own position, on its AI features page, is that no special optimisation is needed, and its guide lists llms.txt files and AI-specific markup under what you do not need to do. Anybody selling you AI visibility as a line item separate from your website is selling you something the search engine says is not a separate job. If what you actually want is AI doing work inside the business, quoting or chasing or answering the same question forty times a week, that is a different piece of work and it is described on our AI implementation page.
Why is my website so hard to update?
Because it was built to be finished rather than to be edited. When there is no proper admin screen, changing a price, adding a service or putting up your Christmas hours needs somebody to edit code, and that means an email, a wait and a bill.
For a service business that is worse than an annoyance. Opening hours go stale. A service you stopped offering two years ago is still on there. And the expensive version of the same fault is the enquiry form that quietly stops delivering, so the messages sit in a database nobody opens, or land in a spam folder because the email records were never set up. Nobody rings to tell you their message did not arrive. They ring somebody else.
What are the hidden costs?
The build price is rarely the price. What gets added afterwards is hosting at a markup, licence renewals for the page builder and the form plugin, an hourly rate every time an automatic update breaks something, and a monthly fee that has to be paid simply to keep the thing online.
Ask for these in writing before you sign:
- What the monthly figure covers, and what is charged on top of it.
- Which licences renew every year, and who pays them.
- What happens when an automatic update breaks the site, and who pays for that hour.
- How quickly somebody answers when the site is down or the form has stopped.
Then add the part nobody quotes for, which is your own time. If a two-line change takes four emails and a fortnight, the real cost of that supplier is not on the invoice at all.
What should I ask before hiring a web designer?
Six questions, and the answers should be in writing rather than said on the phone.
- Will my business own the code, the design and the words outright, assigned in writing when I pay the final invoice?
- Will the domain and the hosting be registered in my company name, with me holding the main login?
- Can my own staff change text, prices, hours and photographs without writing code or paying anybody?
- Can the site be moved to another host without breaking, and will you help if I go?
- How do enquiries reach me, and have you set up the email records so they do not land in spam?
- What happens if the site goes down or the form breaks, and how fast do you answer?
If somebody will not answer the first two in writing, the rest does not matter much.
You are welcome to use the free website check on the site you already have. It crawls every page, runs 48 checks over what it finds, including whether the AI assistants are shut out, and a person reads the results before anything is sent back. Nothing to pay, and the list is yours to hand to whoever looks after your site now.