Getting burned by a web designer is practically a rite of passage for Texas small business owners. You hire someone, pay upfront, and end up with a site that looks dated on day one, doesn’t show up on Google, and leaves you dependent on a developer you can’t reach. The good news: the red flags are visible before you sign anything, if you know what to look for.

Start With Their Own Website

This sounds obvious, but most business owners skip it: look at the agency’s own website as hard evidence of their work. Does it load fast? Does it look genuinely distinctive, or does it look like a template? Can you find it on Google for relevant search terms? If an agency can’t build a compelling, well-optimized site for themselves, there’s no reason to believe they’ll build one for you.

An agency that knows what they’re doing is proud of their own site. It’s their best sales piece. A mediocre agency site is a tell.

What to Look for in Their Portfolio

A portfolio should show diversity and depth — not just screenshots, but sites you can visit live. When you look at portfolio examples:

• Open them on your phone. Do they look polished on mobile?
• Run them through Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Do they actually perform?
• Search for one of the businesses in Google. Does the site rank for anything relevant?
• Read the copy. Is it generic or specific? Does it sound like the business, or like filler?

If the portfolio only exists as screenshots or the live sites are slow and hard to navigate on mobile, treat that as a signal.

The Five Questions That Reveal Real Quality

Ask these before you commit to any web design company:

1. Who owns the website files, domain, and hosting accounts when the project is done? You should own all of it outright, in your own name. Any agency that retains ownership of your site has leverage over you indefinitely.
2. What CMS will the site be built on, and will I be able to update content myself? You need the ability to make basic changes without calling a developer every time.
3. Does the build include SEO setup, or is that a separate service? A site that looks great but isn’t set up to rank is a decoration, not a business asset. Title tags, meta descriptions, schema, and site structure should be part of every build.
4. What does the handoff process look like, and what support is available after launch? Launches are messy. There are always post-launch fixes. Know what’s covered before you sign.
5. Can I see examples of sites you’ve built in my industry? Industry experience matters, especially in niches like healthcare, legal, or home services where trust signals and compliance considerations differ.

Red Flags to Walk Away From

• Vague timelines with no project schedule
• No discovery phase — jumping straight to design without understanding your business
• Guarantees of #1 Google rankings in a short timeframe
• Contracts that give the agency ownership of your domain or files
• Templates passed off as custom design
• No clear point of contact — you’ll just “email the team”

What a Good Agency Relationship Looks Like

The right web design partner treats your site as ongoing infrastructure, not a one-time deliverable. They want to understand your business, your competitors, and your goals before they write a line of code. They’re clear about what they build and what they don’t. And they hand over accounts, files, and documentation when the project ends.

That’s not a high bar — it’s the standard. Plenty of agencies meet it. Plenty don’t. Your job in the hiring process is to tell the difference before you sign.

If you’d like an honest conversation about what we do, how we do it, and whether we’re the right fit for your business, reach out here. We’re happy to show you our process and let our work speak for itself.

Frequently asked questions

If you run a business in Texas with a public-facing website, web accessibility isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s a legal exposure point. Demand letters and federal lawsuits targeting business websites under the Americans with Disabilities Act have been increasing steadily. The good news: the fixes aren’t as expensive or complicated as the legal risk makes them sound, and the same improvements that protect you legally also improve your SEO and user experience.

This isn’t legal advice — talk to a Texas attorney for that. What follows is a practical overview of what’s on the table and where to start.

What ADA Title III Means for Websites

ADA Title III covers places of public accommodation — businesses open to the general public. Courts have increasingly ruled that this includes websites. The legal standard most often cited in these cases is WCAG 2.1 AA (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Level AA), published by the W3C. It covers four principles: websites must be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.

Industries that face the most litigation include retail, hospitality, healthcare, financial services, and food service. But demand letters have targeted businesses of all sizes, including small local businesses.

The Most Common Violations

Most websites fail on the same handful of issues:

• Missing alt text on images. Screen readers read alt text aloud for visually impaired users. An image with no alt tag is invisible — or worse, read as the file name.
• Insufficient color contrast. Light gray text on a white background looks clean in design but fails the contrast ratio standards that make text readable for low-vision users.
• Forms without labels. A form field that says “enter your name” as placeholder text may look fine visually, but if it has no associated HTML label, assistive technology can’t identify it.
• Videos without captions. Any video with meaningful audio needs synchronized captions.
• Keyboard navigation failures. Users who can’t use a mouse need to navigate your site entirely via keyboard. Menus or modals that only work with a cursor are barriers.
• PDFs without accessibility tags. A menu or brochure posted as a scanned PDF is completely inaccessible to screen readers.

Quick Wins You Can Check Today

Before you hire anyone, run Google’s Lighthouse audit on your site (it’s free, built into Chrome DevTools). It won’t catch everything, but it surfaces the most obvious issues. Then walk through this short list:

1. Open your site and unplug your mouse. Can you tab through the navigation and reach every page?
2. Check your images in the CMS. Do they all have descriptive alt text?
3. Look at your forms. Every field should have a visible label above it, not just placeholder text inside.
4. Run your key pages through the WebAIM Contrast Checker. Body text should pass AA standards.

Why Accessibility Also Improves SEO

Here’s the part most business owners don’t realize: accessibility and SEO are deeply aligned. Alt text helps Google understand your images. Proper heading structure helps crawlers understand your page hierarchy. Fast, semantic HTML benefits both screen readers and search bots. Fixing accessibility issues is rarely wasted effort — it usually improves your website’s overall quality across the board.

Ongoing Accessibility Maintenance

Compliance isn’t a one-time checkbox. New content, new plugins, and site updates can introduce new violations. A website care plan that includes periodic accessibility audits keeps you protected as your site evolves. At minimum, run an automated audit every quarter and manually test any new major features.

If your site hasn’t been built with accessibility in mind — or if it was built more than three or four years ago — it’s worth having a professional review it. Get in touch and we can assess where your site stands and what remediation makes the most sense for your business.

Frequently asked questions