There are good designers here and there are a lot of people doing this part-time. It is not a difficult thing to get wrong and it is expensive to get wrong, so here is what to ask — including the questions that only make sense in this market.
Look at live sites, not screenshots
Ask for three sites they built and open them on your own phone, on mobile data, not wifi. Time how long they take to appear — a page that crawls on a patchy connection is a page that loses the enquiry before it has finished loading. Try to book something. Look for the small tells: a menu that is three years out of date, a form that goes nowhere, a page that says 'best on the coast' with no evidence. A portfolio full of screenshots is a portfolio full of sites that may not exist any more.
Ask what they know about trading here
The questions that separate a designer who works in this market from one who found a template. Where does the website get used in September, when the season has turned? How do they handle a business that closes for two weeks because of a storm? What do they do about enquiries in German or Russian? Have they built anything for a vacation rental, a colmado, a dental clinic or a beach bar, and can they talk about the specific problems rather than the general ones? An answer that mentions mobile data, apagones, WhatsApp, seasonal hours and Booking.com is a good sign.
Ask the awkward questions
- Is the domain registered in my name, and can I see the account?
- What is in the price and what is extra — photography, copywriting, extra languages?
- Who answers when something breaks in August, and how quickly?
- How do you handle cookie consent under Ley 172-13 and the GDPR?
- What does the site cost me to run each year, after you have gone?
- Can I move to another developer later, and what would that involve?
Warning signs
- The same design across five supposedly different businesses
- A price list on the website and no willingness to discuss what your site needs
- Guarantees about search positions, or a first page in a month
- Reluctance to put the scope and the price in writing
- A site hosted on a subdomain of their own, so leaving means losing everything
- Enthusiasm about cheap traffic, and no questions about your customers
And what a good quote contains
A fixed price, a timeline, a list of what is included and what is not, who owns the domain and the content, and how long the work takes in practice. Prices in dollars with ITBIS broken out so it goes into your accounts. A designer who cannot produce that in writing is not going to be much fun to work with once the project gets complicated, and it will get complicated.
One last thing: talk to them about after. The site is the beginning of a relationship, not the end of a project, and the question of who is still answering in three years tells you more about the fit than anything in the first message.