How to choose a web designer in Malta

Choosing who builds your website is mostly a problem of asymmetry. The person quoting knows what the work involves and you do not, and the thing being sold does not exist yet. Screenshots look the same whether the site behind them loads in one second or eight. This article sets out the questions that separate a good choice from a regretted one, and the parts you can verify yourself without technical knowledge.

Decide what the site has to do before you compare anyone

Before you speak to a studio, a freelancer or an agency, write down in one or two sentences what the site is for. Bookings for a clinic in Sliema, enquiries for a contractor working across Malta and Gozo, orders shipped from a warehouse, applications from candidates. The answer changes what you are buying. A site built to take payments is a different project from a site built to generate phone calls, and comparing quotes for two different projects is not comparing anything at all.

Write down the three or four things a visitor must be able to do, and the one thing you most want them to do. Then ask every candidate how their proposal serves that. Vague answers at this stage tend to become vague websites.

Look at live sites, not screenshots

Google's guidance on hiring search help suggests asking for examples of previous work, and the same applies to design. Ask for URLs, not a PDF portfolio. A screenshot cannot show you load time, how the navigation behaves on a phone, whether the forms work, or whether the site is still online a year later.

When you have the URLs, open them on your own phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi. Ask whether the work shown is the designer's own and what part of it they did. Design, build, content and photography are often different hands. If the studio also handles art direction, content and imagery, ask which of the sites you are looking at they shot and wrote themselves.

Ownership: domain, code, hosting, content

This is the part that causes the most damage and the least discussion. Settle four questions in writing before work starts.

• Domain. The .com.mt or .mt name should be registered in your business's name, in an account you control, with the renewal reminders coming to an address you read. If someone else registers it "for convenience", leaving them later becomes a negotiation.
• Code. Agree that the finished site files are yours and that you can take them to another developer. A site built by hand in standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript is portable in a way that a site locked into one supplier's proprietary platform is not.
• Hosting. Know where the site lives and whose account pays for it. You should be able to obtain a full backup on request.
• Content. Photographs, copy and logos all have owners. If the studio commissioned images, establish what licence you hold and for how long.

None of this is adversarial. Any serious supplier expects to be asked, and the ones who bristle are telling you something useful.

SEO: the questions Google says to ask, and the red flags

Google publishes its own guidance on hiring search help, and it is the most useful vetting document available to a business owner because it comes from the search engine rather than from the industry selling the service.

Google suggests asking for examples of previous work and successes, and asking whether the provider will share every change they make to your site. It also suggests asking what kind of results to expect and in what timeframe, and how they measure success. Ask these questions out loud and listen for whether the answers are specific.

The red flags Google itself lists:

• Guaranteed rankings. Google states that no one can guarantee a number one ranking on Google. If you hear it, stop.
• Unsolicited pitches. Cold emails and messages promising to fix your search presence are a warning sign.
• Secretive methods. A provider who will not explain what they do, or who will not tell you what they changed on your site, is not working for you.
• Link schemes. Offers to buy or build links to your site fall outside what Google wants to see.

Google also says the best time to hire is when you are considering a site redesign or planning a new site, and that the earlier the better. That is an argument for choosing someone who treats search as part of the build rather than an invoice line added later. The basics in Google's own starter guide are structural: helping Google find, crawl and understand your pages, giving each page a descriptive title and snippet, writing useful content for people, linking sensibly between pages, and giving images alt text. Those are build decisions, which is why SEO in Malta and web design in Malta are better treated as one job.

Ask directly who writes the content. Useful, people-first content does not arrive by itself, and a project with no named writer launches with placeholder text.

Speed, accessibility and mobile as checks you can run yourself

You do not need to be technical to apply three tests to a designer's existing work.

Mobile. Google uses the mobile version of a site's content for indexing and ranking. The mobile and desktop versions should carry the same content. Open a site on a phone and a laptop side by side. If the mobile version is missing sections the desktop one has, that is a problem the designer has created for their client.

Speed and stability. The Chrome team's Core Web Vitals give you three thresholds you can judge by feel and then verify:

These are assessed at the 75th percentile of page loads, with mobile and desktop measured separately. In practice: does the page show you something useful almost immediately, does it respond when you tap, and does the button stay where you aimed?

Accessibility. WCAG 2 is the international standard for web accessibility, published by the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative. Ask whether the studio works to it and what that means in their builds.

After launch: who changes what

A website is not a delivery, it is something you will edit. Agree before you sign:

• Which parts you can change yourself, and whether you have been shown how.
• What happens when you need a new page, and how that is handled.
• Who is responsible if something breaks, and how you reach them.
• Whether you will be told about every change made to your site, as Google recommends asking.

If you already have a site and are weighing up repair against rebuild, that decision belongs with the same conversation, because Google's advice is to involve search thinking at redesign time. A website redesign that carries forward the old URLs and content badly can cost you visibility you already had.

made.mt designs sites from a blank page, builds them by hand without a page builder, and sets up technical SEO, page speed, structured data and local search from the start. You can see the full range of services or start a project when you have your answers to the questions above.