How to choose a web developer who won't make you feel stupid

Somewhere right now, a small business owner is opening Facebook and finding their own homepage in a public group. Someone has screenshotted it, blurred the name just enough to claim they were being discreet, added a crying-laughing emoji, and asked the internet whether anyone would trust a business like that. The comments pile in. The business owner, who recognises their own website the way you recognise your own handwriting, quietly closes the app and does not hire anyone that week.

That moment is the reason this article exists. Knowing how to choose a web developer is not only about code, prices or portfolios. It is about finding someone you can ask a naive question without being turned into a lesson for strangers. By the end of this you will know what a good developer looks like, what a website should actually do for you, the red flags that cost you money quietly, and why being kind and being competent are not a trade-off. You deserve both.

How to choose a web developer: start with how they treat you

Before you look at a single portfolio, look at how the person talks about clients. Especially past ones. Especially the ones who left.

This is not a soft, feelings-first idea. It is one of the best-studied findings in social psychology. Researchers Susan Fiske, Amy Cuddy and Peter Glick found that people judge others on two dimensions before almost anything else: warmth and competence. Their paper, Universal dimensions of social cognition: warmth and competence, reports that people seen as both warm and competent draw uniformly positive reactions, and warmth tends to be judged first. Before you decide whether someone can do the job, you have already decided whether they are on your side.

The workplace version is even blunter. In Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks, published in Harvard Business Review, Tiziana Casciaro and Miguel Sousa Lobo studied who people actually choose to work with. The short version: when someone is strongly disliked, it barely matters how competent they are, because people avoid them. Talent does not rescue a jerk. People just quietly route around him.

Your clients do the same thing. So do you.

Smart is common. Kind and competent is the rare combination.

The web is full of smart people. Some of them know redirect maps, crawl budgets and schema markup in their sleep. Good. You need that knowledge on your side. But you do not need it delivered with a sneer, and you definitely do not need it delivered to a Facebook group.

Clients do not hire the smartest person in the room. They hire the one who does not make them feel stupid for asking. If a developer is brilliant and you dread every phone call, the brilliance is not working for you. You will stop asking questions, stop sharing ideas, and eventually stop being a client. That is not a character flaw on your part. That is the psychology above, playing out on your invoice.

Public shaming is a red flag, even when it's aimed at someone else

Here is a test you can run in five minutes: read what a developer posts publicly about other people's websites.

If their feed is a steady parade of "LOOK AT THIS DISASTER" with somebody's homepage attached, ask yourself one question. What will they post about yours the day you disagree with them, or the day you leave?

Researchers have measured this too. Christine Porath, Debbie MacInnis and Valerie Folkes found that customers who merely witness rudeness toward someone else get angry and make negative inferences about the whole company. Their study, Witnessing Incivility among Employees in the Journal of Consumer Research, shows that the rudeness does not have to be aimed at you to cost the business your trust. You were watching. That was enough.

In other words, the developer who mocks a stranger's site in public is not teaching anyone about web design. He is advertising how he treats people, to every prospective client reading along. It is a lot of reputation to spend on a joke.

Mistakes deserve a private conversation, not a public lecture

Every website has something wrong with it. Mine included. A stats block that does not quite add up, an old page nobody updated, a photo that seemed like a great idea in 2019. The right response to a mistake is a quiet email that says, "I noticed this, here is how we could fix it." That email builds a relationship. The public post burns one, and it burns the poster's reputation along with it.

The worse someone's website is, the more they need help. That is not a punchline. That is a sales opportunity for any developer polite enough to take it.

It's your business, so it's your decision

I have built websites for a long time, and I have disagreed with plenty of my clients' decisions. A colour I would not have chosen. A page I thought was unnecessary. A plan to leave a provider at a time I would not have picked.

Here is what I do when I disagree: I say so, once, clearly, with my reasons. Then I do what the client decides. Because they are the client. It is their business, their money, their name on the door, and their call.

A good web developer works for you. You should feel safe telling them, "I don't like that," or "I want to try something else," or even "I'm thinking of leaving." If saying any of those out loud makes your stomach tighten, that is information. You should not need courage to have an opinion about your own website.

And if you do leave? A professional helps you go with as little damage as possible. They hand over what is yours, explain what to redirect, and wish you well. They do not write you a public essay about how foolish you were. If you ever leave a developer, it should be because of the work or the fit, never because of how they treated you.

What a website should actually do for you

So you have found someone who is decent to talk to. Now let's make sure they are also building the right thing, because kindness without competence is just a very pleasant way to waste money.

Ten to twelve good pages beat 700 copied ones

At Exhibit A Media we build a new site with roughly ten to twelve pages: the pages your clients actually need, written for your business and nobody else's. Home, about, each core service, contact, and the questions your clients ask most. Then we spend the next six months improving it and adding to it, steadily. New articles, better answers, stronger service pages, refreshed older content.

That is deliberate. Content quality matters at least as much as content quantity. A site with twelve pages that each answer a real question will usually do more for you than a site with hundreds of pages that say the same thing in slightly different fonts. We wrote about why that upkeep never really stops in Is SEO a one-time thing? It's an all-time thing, and about keeping older pages useful in publishing is the easy part, the money is in the refresh.

Page count is the website equivalent of measuring a lawyer by the weight of their briefcase. It is a number. It is not the point.

Duplicate content: the quiet problem nobody emails you about

Some website platforms pour the same articles into many client sites at once. You get a big page count on day one, and it looks impressive in a sales meeting. The problem is that Google can see every copy.

Google's guidance on consolidating duplicate URLs explains that when it finds pages with very similar content, it picks one version to show and leaves the others out. Its own Search Central blog famously said there is no "duplicate content penalty" in the sense most people mean; instead, Google filters duplicates so searchers do not see the same thing ten times. That sounds reassuring until you realise what it means for you: if your article is one of a hundred identical copies, there is a very good chance yours is one of the ninety-nine nobody sees.

Here is the part that stings. For that quiet filtering, nobody tells you. There is no letter, no email, no polite note from Google saying "your 400 pages are invisible." Your site simply never ranks for those pages, and you assume SEO "doesn't work for your industry." If copying goes far enough, Google's spam policies on scraped and scaled content come into play, and that can draw a manual action that shows up in Search Console's Manual Actions report. Either way, you are paying for pages that are working against you or not working at all.

It does not matter how many pages you have if they are the same regurgitated text, sitting in the same ecosystem, that Google has already read a hundred times elsewhere. Google's guidance on helpful, people-first content asks whether content offers original information and analysis, not whether there is a lot of it. A quick test you can do yourself: copy a full sentence from your own blog, paste it into Google inside quotation marks, and see how many other businesses' websites come up with the exact same sentence. If the answer is "lots," you have your explanation.

Unique content, written by someone who knows your work

The alternative is boring and effective: original content, written for your business, by someone who understands what you do. That is my job here. I spent decades in legal practice before I built websites, so when I write a page for a lawyer, a paralegal, a notary or any professional service, I know the questions their clients ask on the phone, nervously, at 9 p.m. Those questions become pages. You can read more about my background on my team page.

The red flags that cost you quietly

Rudeness is the loud red flag. These are the quiet ones, and they tend to show up in the contract rather than on Facebook.

The monthly-fee website you can never take with you

Some providers charge a monthly fee for a website that you never actually own. Stop paying and the site disappears, along with every page, every image and every article. That developer is not building a website for you. They are renting you an apartment. Lovely views, maybe, but the furniture stays when you leave, and so does everything you hung on the walls.

Renting is not automatically wrong. Some people rent happily for years. But you should know you are renting before you sign, not after you try to leave. We covered this in detail in you don't own your website, you're renting it, and it is worth ten minutes before your next contract.

Articles written in someone else's dashboard

Here is a sneaky version of the same problem. Some platforms invite you to write your own blog posts through their back-end dashboard. You pour hours into those articles. Then you leave, and the articles stay behind, because they lived in a system you never owned. Years of your own writing, gone, like leaving your diary in a hotel room.

Before you write a single word on any platform, ask: "If I leave, do I get my content back, in a format I can use somewhere else?" Get the answer in writing. Better still, keep your own copy of everything you write, somewhere that is yours.

Your domain name is your phone number

If you take one thing from this article, take this.

Your domain name is like your business phone number. It is printed on your cards, your letterhead, your Google Business Profile and every directory listing you have ever filled in. Clients have it saved. Other websites link to it. If someone else controls it, they control the line your clients use to reach you.

You should own your domain, or at the very least be listed as the registrant on it, so that if you ever leave your developer, the domain stays with you. ICANN, the body that coordinates domain names, publishes a plain-language page on registrants' benefits and responsibilities. For a .ca domain, you can look up who is on record using CIRA's WHOIS lookup. Do it today. If the registrant is your web developer's company instead of you, ask, politely, for it to be put in your name. A good developer will say yes without making it weird.

We are happy to manage domain renewals for clients who want one less thing to remember, but the domain stays registered to you. That is the whole point.

A website alone isn't marketing

Here is the uncomfortable truth for anyone who bought a website and then waited for the phone to ring: a website on its own is not marketing. It is a very nice storefront on a street nobody has been told about.

Marketing is everything that sends people to the storefront and convinces them to walk in. The ultimate goal is a conversion: a call, a booking, a form, a client. Pages alone rarely get you there.

Social posts that point back to your website

People check businesses on social media before they call. A Facebook page that has not posted since a holiday greeting two years ago tells them something. Regular posts on Facebook and LinkedIn that relate to your website's actual content do two jobs at once: they show you are active and real, and they give people a reason to click through to the pages that explain your services. That is why our social media pipeline builds posts from the articles on your site, not from generic inspirational quotes about Mondays.

Video on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram

People search on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram the way they search on Google. A short video answering one real question your clients ask can find people your website never would, and then send them to the website for the full answer. YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok and Instagram are all places that can drive traffic, and a strategy that ignores all of them is leaving whole neighbourhoods off the map. Our short-form video work exists for exactly this reason. We are careful not to claim that social activity directly ranks your site in Google, because Google has never said that. What it does is put you in front of people, and people are who hire you.

For how search, answer engines and social posts connect, read the intersection of SEO, AEO, GEO and social posts.

Directories, your Google Business Profile, and actual humans

Marketing also means being findable in the places people already look: your Google Business Profile, the business directories in your industry, your professional association's listings. We explain why your profile often matters more than your homepage in your Google Business Profile outranks your website.

And it means showing up in person. Networking groups, chamber events, the coffee with a colleague who refers you two clients a year. No developer can build that for you, but a good one will remind you it matters, instead of pretending a few hundred extra pages are a substitute for being known. Marketing is being in many places, consistently, with the same honest message. It is not building a bunch of pages and hoping.

The kind of team we try to be

I will be upfront: this is the part where I talk about us. You can skip it, and I won't post about it.

When you contact Exhibit A Media, the first person you will usually talk to is Jana Smith, our partner in business development. Jana is exceptionally good at the part most agencies skip: listening. She will ask what you actually want your website to do, what has gone wrong before, and what worries you. You can tell her your last developer made you feel foolish, and she will not make you feel foolish for having stayed.

Then you get me. I build the site and write the content, and I write it uniquely for you. Not a template with your name swapped in. Not an article that also appears on forty other businesses' blogs. If you want to see what that looks like in practice, our portfolio shows real sites already in use, and our websites page explains how a build and ongoing care fit together.

We build around ten to twelve strong pages, then improve and expand them over six months. We pair that with marketing that reaches beyond the site: social posts, video, directories. Your domain stays in your name. And if you ever decide to leave, we will help you pack. Politely. Without a Facebook post.

Questions to ask a web developer before you hire them

Take this list into your next meeting. A good developer will be glad you asked. A bad one will get defensive, which is its own answer.

• Whose name will the domain be registered in? The right answer is yours.
• If I leave, what do I take with me? You want the pages, the content, the images, and ideally the code.
• Is the content written for my business, or shared with other clients? Ask for an example sentence and test it in Google yourself.
• How many pages, and what happens after launch? Look for a plan to improve and add, not just a page count.
• What else besides the website? Social, video, directories, your Google Business Profile.
• What happens when I disagree with you? Listen to the tone of the answer as much as the words.
• Can I talk to a client who has worked with you? Reputations are built in private conversations, too.

If you are comparing more than one quote, our scope worksheet for comparing website design quotes helps you line them up fairly. And if you work in a regulated profession, what regulated professionals need in a web developer covers the extra rules you are working under.

The bottom line

You will make decisions about your website that some expert somewhere disagrees with. That is fine. That is what being the client means. The right web developer tells you the truth, respects your call, builds content that is genuinely yours, keeps your domain in your name, and helps you market beyond a single website. And never, under any circumstances, uses your homepage as material for their comedy hour.

Smart people are everywhere. Find one who is also kind. If you would like to talk to us, get in touch here. Ask us anything. There are no stupid questions, and we will not screenshot yours.

Frequently asked questions

How do I choose a web developer for a small business?

Start with how they treat people, then check the work. Look for a developer who answers questions patiently, puts your domain in your name, writes original content for your business, plans to improve the site after launch, and can explain what marketing beyond the website looks like. Ask for references and read what they post publicly about others.

What are the red flags when hiring a web developer?

Publicly mocking other businesses' websites, registering your domain in their own name, a monthly fee for a site you can never take with you, content shared across many client sites, blog posts locked inside a dashboard you cannot export, and defensiveness when you ask any of these questions. Any one of them deserves a closer look before you sign.

Does Google penalize duplicate content?

Not usually in the way people imagine. Google says it filters duplicate pages, showing one version and leaving the rest out, and it does not email you when it does. The effect is that copied pages quietly never rank. Large-scale copying or scraped content can also break Google's spam policies and draw a manual action in Search Console.

Should I own my domain name or should my web developer?

You should. Your domain works like your business phone number: clients, directories and other websites all point to it. Make sure you are the registrant on record, so the domain stays with you if you ever change developers. You can check a .ca domain's registrant using CIRA's WHOIS lookup.

How many pages does a small business website need?

Fewer than most people think, as long as each one earns its place. We start most sites with about ten to twelve pages covering the business, each core service, contact and the most common client questions, then add and improve content over the following six months. Quality and originality matter more than raw page count.

Is a website enough to market my business?

No. A website is where people land, but something has to send them there. Social posts on Facebook and LinkedIn, short videos on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, your Google Business Profile, industry directories and real-world networking all bring people to the site. The goal is a conversion, and that usually takes more than pages.

What if I want to leave my current web developer?

That is your decision to make, and a professional will respect it. Before you go, confirm you control your domain, ask for a copy of your content and images, and map your important old pages to new addresses with permanent redirects so you keep what you have built. A good developer will help you leave cleanly.