How to choose a web design company in Seattle

Search for a web design company in Seattle and you will get hundreds of results: solo freelancers in Ballard, ten-person studios in Pioneer Square, big Bellevue agencies, and offshore teams with a Seattle phone number. All of them will show you a nice portfolio. Very few will show you what you actually need to know.

This guide is how we would choose, if we were on your side of the table. It applies just as well to Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond, Tacoma and Everett — the market is the same market.

First, decide what kind of partner you need

A freelancer

Often the best value for a small, well-defined site. The risk is concentration: one person is the designer, developer, project manager and support desk. Ask what happens when they are sick, on holiday, or fully booked.

A small studio

Design, development and SEO under one roof, with a named person you talk to. Usually the right fit for a business whose website is a real sales channel but does not need a twelve-person account team.

A large agency

Right when you need brand strategy, campaigns and a site in one engagement, and have the budget for it. Make sure you know who actually builds your site — at some agencies it is not the people in the pitch.

A DIY builder

Fine for a placeholder or a hobby. For a business that wants to rank and convert, the limits on speed, structure and SEO usually show up within a year — we measured some of them in the real cost of a page builder.

Six things to check before you shortlist anyone

1. Live sites, not screenshots. Ask for URLs. Open them on your phone. A portfolio of images tells you about the designer's taste; a live site tells you whether it still works two years later.
2. Their speed, measured. Paste two or three of their client sites into PageSpeed Insights. Look at the mobile numbers and the field data. A studio that cannot keep its own work fast will not keep yours fast.
3. Who owns what. The domain, the hosting account, the code and the content should be yours. If any of them are "held" by the agency, find out what it costs to leave.
4. How SEO is handled. "SEO-friendly" means nothing. Ask what is in the build: redirects from your old URLs, metadata, structured data, a page for each service and location you want to rank for.
5. Fixed price or hourly. Either can be honest. Hourly needs a cap and a weekly report; fixed needs a written scope. A quote with neither is a guess.
6. What happens after launch. Who fixes it when something breaks in month four? Is support included, and for how long? What does it cost afterwards?

Does it matter that they are local?

Less than it used to, and more than people think. Most of the work happens remotely either way. What a Seattle-area studio does bring is knowledge of how local search works here: which neighborhoods and suburbs your customers actually search by, how the Google Business Profile map pack behaves in a dense market, and what your local competitors are already doing.

It also means you can meet in person when it is useful — for a kickoff, a workshop or a launch review — and that the person you hire is in your time zone when something goes wrong at 4pm on a Friday.

Red flags that cost you later

• A price before anyone has asked what the site needs to do.
• Guaranteed first-page rankings. Nobody can promise what Google will do.
• No mention of redirects when you already have a site that ranks.
• A contract that keeps the domain, hosting or code in the agency's name.
• Portfolio sites that are slow, broken on mobile, or no longer online.
• Nobody can tell you who will actually do the work.

How we would run the decision

1. Shortlist three providers of the type that fits your project.
2. Give all three the same written brief, including your goal and your budget range.
3. Compare the proposals on scope and ownership first, price second.
4. Check two live client sites from each, on your own phone.
5. Pick the one whose questions were best. The quality of the questions predicts the quality of the project.

If you want to see how we answer those questions, our process, pricing and client work are all public — and we are happy to be one of your three.