Web design in St Albans: how to choose an agency you can meet

To choose a web design agency in St Albans, start with what the site has to do for your business, shortlist two or three agencies whose live work you like, meet them in person, and compare written quotes line by line. A good local agency will show you live sites rather than mock-ups, tell you who will actually do the work, quote clearly with VAT shown, and make sure you own the domain, code and content. Expect to pay from a few hundred pounds for a simple site to several thousand for an online shop or a site that takes bookings.

We are a St Albans agency ourselves, at 17 Orient Close, so read this with that in mind. We have tried to write the guide we would want a friend to read before hiring anyone, including us.

Why meeting your web designer still matters

Plenty of good websites are built entirely over video calls, and most of our UK-wide work runs that way. But for a local business there are real advantages to a supplier you can sit down with:

• You explain your business faster. Twenty minutes across a table with your price list and a few photos beats a dozen emails.
• You can judge the people. You will work with this team for years if the site does its job. You learn a lot from how they listen.
• They know the local market. A St Albans agency knows what customers in AL1 to AL4 search for, which towns your customers travel from, and who your competitors are on the high street.
• Problems get solved quicker. When something goes wrong the week before a launch, being able to pop in, or have them pop round, saves days.
• Accountability. A registered company with a real address and a phone number that gets answered is harder to disappear than an anonymous profile on a freelance marketplace.

Meeting is not a substitute for checking the work. But it is a very good filter.

Step 1: Decide what the website actually has to do

Before you contact anyone, write half a page answering these questions. It will save you money, because agencies quote high when the brief is vague.

• What should a visitor do? Call, book, buy, request a quote, visit the shop?
• Who are your customers, and where do they come from? St Albans only, or Harpenden, Hatfield, Watford and north London too?
• Which pages do you need? List them, even roughly.
• Do you need bookings, payments, an online shop, a members’ area or a newsletter?
• Who will write the text and supply photos?
• Who will update the site after launch, and how often?
• What is your budget, and your deadline? Be honest about both.

If you are not sure what a modern small business site should include, our guide to what a business website needs is a good checklist.

Step 2: Build a shortlist of two or three

Search for web design in St Albans, ask other local business owners who built their site, and check who is behind the sites you already like. Then look at each agency properly.

Look at live sites, not screenshots

Open their recent work on your phone. Does it load quickly on 4G? Is the text readable without zooming? Does the booking form or contact form actually work? A portfolio of pretty images tells you less than five minutes clicking around a live site.

Check the type of work

An agency that mainly builds national e-commerce sites may not be the best fit for a ten-page site for a physio in Fleetville, and vice versa. Look for work similar in size and purpose to yours: local services, bookings, shops, professional firms.

Check the company

Look them up on Companies House, check reviews on Google, and ask for a reference you can phone. A reputable agency will give you one without fuss.

Step 3: Questions to ask at the first meeting

1. Who will design and build my site, and who will be my main contact?
2. Is the design custom, or based on a template? Can I see an example of each?
3. What platform will you use, and why that one for my business?
4. Will I own the domain, the code and all content? Can I move the site to another host or developer?
5. Is the price including or excluding VAT, and what exactly is included?
6. How many design revisions are included, and what happens if I want more?
7. How do you handle mobile layouts, page speed and accessibility?
8. What SEO set-up is included: titles, meta descriptions, sitemap, Google Search Console, local business schema?
9. If I have an existing site, how will you redirect old pages so I keep my Google rankings?
10. What does aftercare cost: hosting, updates, backups, small changes?
11. How long will it take, and what do you need from me, and when?
12. What happens if the project stalls or I am unhappy?

Write the answers down. The most useful thing you will learn is often not the answer itself but whether they answered clearly or changed the subject.

What a good agency will ask you

The meeting should not be one-way. A good agency will ask about your business before talking about design: how customers find you now, what your best enquiries look like, which services make you the most money, and what has disappointed you about your current site. If they jump straight to colour schemes and fonts, they are selling a look, not a result.

They should also ask practical questions: who registered your current domain, who has the hosting logins, and whether you use Google Business Profile. A surprising number of St Albans businesses discover during this conversation that a former supplier still controls their domain. Sorting that out early avoids a nasty surprise on launch day.

Step 4: Compare quotes properly

Put quotes in a simple table: price excluding VAT, price including VAT, number of pages, custom or template, CMS included, mobile included, SEO set-up, revisions, timescale, hosting and maintenance cost, and ownership. Gaps jump out quickly. The cheapest quote often turns out to be the one missing the CMS, the mobile layout or the redirects from your old site.

For a fuller breakdown of where website money goes, see our guide to website costs in the UK.

What web design costs in St Albans

Local agencies and freelancers in and around St Albans typically quote somewhere in these ranges, excluding VAT. They are typical ranges from the quotes we see, not survey data:

Our own fixed prices, for comparison:

Smaller jobs, like adding a booking system or fixing a slow site, we price by the hour from £45/h for design and £50/h for WordPress, with discounts from 5 % at 10 hours to 25 % at 100 hours. Full details are on our packages page.

Why are St Albans agencies often cheaper than London for the same work? Mostly overheads. Hertfordshire rents and salaries are lower than in central London, and many local agencies, including us, serve London clients at Hertfordshire prices.

Local agency, London agency or remote freelancer?

Red flags

• The domain registered in the agency’s name. Your domain should be in your name, always.
• No access to the site’s admin or hosting. You should have logins from day one.
• “We guarantee page one of Google.” Nobody can promise that honestly.
• No written scope. If it is not in writing, it is not included.
• Prices that only work on their hosting, with no way to move the site later.
• Pressure to sign today for a discount that will vanish.

Step 5: Agree how the project will run

Once you have chosen, agree in writing: the page list and features, the timeline with your own deadlines for content and feedback, payment stages (a 50 % deposit with the balance on completion is common), who supplies text and images, and the launch checklist. Agree who will look after the site after launch, too. A short call every week or two keeps most projects on track; our clients in St Albans often prefer to drop in instead.

Most delays we see are content delays. If you can have your text and photos ready before design starts, the project will very likely finish on time.

Content checklist before design starts

• Your logo as a vector file (SVG, EPS or PDF), and brand colours if you have them.
• Text for each page, even in rough form. A designer can tidy words; they cannot invent your prices.
• Ten to twenty good photos of your premises, team and work. Phone photos in good daylight beat generic stock.
• Two or three sites you like, and one you dislike, with a sentence on why.
• Logins for your domain registrar, current hosting, Google Business Profile and Google Analytics.
• Any reviews or accreditations you are allowed to display.

Working with WE-DEV in St Albans

We are a software and web development agency based at 17 Orient Close, St Albans AL1 1AJ. We build hand-made WordPress sites without page builders, WooCommerce shops, booking systems and custom web software, and we aim for Lighthouse 95+ and WCAG 2.2 AA on every template. We meet clients in St Albans, across Hertfordshire (Harpenden, Watford, Hatfield, Hemel Hempstead, Welwyn Garden City, Stevenage, Hertford) and in London, which is about 20 minutes away on Thameslink.

Past local work includes a WordPress site with online bookings and local SEO for Hypnotic Art, and a WordPress site plus Flutter app for Tattoo-Art & Obsession. You can see more on our clients page.

If you would like to talk it through, call 01727 309243 or send us a message and we will arrange a time to meet. More about our local service is on the web design St Albans page.

Photo: Charlie Green via Unsplash