Your website designer needs to have excellent communication with you, and I can’t stress this enough. I’ve heard several stories about designers "ghosting" their clients when a project was only half complete. leaving the business owner to either figure it out on their own or start fresh. Make sure upfront that your designer has excellent communication skills and clearly sets expectations for getting back to you.

Your designer needs to be organized and have systems already in place. Email alone is hard to keep organized and things tend to fall through the cracks. From the start of your project, there should be an outline of how the designer will work with you, where files and design concepts will be shared, and how the communication flow will work.

Your website designer should communicate how long your project will take and then communicate timelines for completed work along the way. They should have a step-by-step process that they focus on until your project is complete. While every project is fluid, of course, be wary of a designer whose estimates are too open-ended.

Make sure you OWN your domain name. It's perfectly fine (and often saves money) if you let your designer host your site, but the domain is the ultimate control if something goes wrong or if something were to happen to your web designer. Also, make sure you can access your site in case you ever need to.

Your web designer should have a friendly and easy-to-understand agreement or contract they share with you before you pay them. Make sure you read this thoroughly and understand what you are signing. Not having an agreement or contract is unprofessional and shows they may only be doing this as a side gig. Some may have an agreement, but have many limitation that you might find unpleasing. So please do your due diligence, read through it thoroughly, and ask questions if you don’t understand something.

Your web designer should have a good understand of marketing and business. While design is very important, of course, there's more that goes into having a successful site than design alone. Your copy is what persuades and you site's information flow is what gets it working hard for you. Remember, your website has a job to do and that is to help you warm up cold leads and sell warm ones.