An interior designer is genuinely worth paying to help you stage your house and approve the aesthetics. They are not the person you ask about taking out a load-bearing wall, because they are not a structural engineer or a carpenter.

Everybody understands that line without having to be taught it. The same line exists in web work, and almost nobody can see it.

There is a whole industry of people selling website development who have never configured a server, never used a terminal without the assistance of a Google search, and could not tell you what happens between someone typing your domain and your homepage appearing.

They are designers. Or marketers. Often very good ones. But somewhere along the way "web designer" started being sold as "web developer", and business owners have no way to tell the difference until it costs them. Another possibility is it can cost them from the beginning due to loss of potential revenue because of poor UX, SEO or missing out basic elements such as analytics.

Websites are intended to be investments that work for you 24/7... and make you money. They're not just a digital brochure that showcases your brand, team, ethos and offerings.

The line, and why it matters

Design is how it looks and how it feels to use. That's a real skill and I'm not diminishing it. I've worked with excellent designers and the good ones make everything better.

Development is what it's made of, where it runs, how fast it loads, whether it's secure, whether it can be changed in two years without starting again, and what happens at 2am when something fails.

A designer who can't do the second half isn't half a developer. They're a designer who is now responsible for things they do not understand and often can't fix themselves.

Here's the test I'd apply to anyone quoting on your website. Ask them:

  • Where will this be hosted, and why that host?
  • What's the deployment process?
  • Where does DNS sit and who controls it?
  • How are backups taken, and have you ever restored one?
  • What's the TTL on the records if we need to move fast?
  • Which version control are you using?

You don't need to understand the answers. You need to watch whether they have any.

If the response is "I'll check with our hosting partner", you now know who's actually building your site, and it isn't the person you're paying.

Living in the command line

I'm not romanticising the terminal for its own sake. It matters because of what it represents.

Someone who works in the command line has had to understand the machine. They've configured a web server, set up TLS, read logs to find out why something was returning a 502, watched a deploy fail and worked out why. They know what a cron job is because they've written one that mattered.

That's not gatekeeping. It's the difference between someone who can diagnose and someone who can only escalate.

The practical consequence for you is speed and cost. When something goes wrong with a site built by someone who understands the stack, it gets fixed in an hour. When it goes wrong with a site assembled by someone who doesn't, it becomes a ticket to a host, a reply in 48 hours, a plugin author who's gone quiet, and a bill for the hours spent waiting.

Most of what you pay agencies for, in my experience, is the time they spend not knowing things.

The marketing agency problem

This is the heart of it.

Marketing agencies are good at marketing themselves. That is literally the skill. So when websites became a thing clients wanted, they added it to the list, and they describe it convincingly, because describing things convincingly is the job.

What sits behind it is usually one of three arrangements. A junior with a page builder. A white label subcontractor you'll never meet. Or, increasingly, a model producing code nobody in the building can read.

The output can look fine. That's what makes it dangerous. The client sees a nice homepage and reasonably assumes the parts they can't see are equally well handled. They aren't, because nobody in that chain was ever accountable for them.

So you end up with a good looking site that takes six seconds to load, leaks credentials, has no backups, forms that fail silently, and a complete inability to tell you why enquiries dropped.

And when you ask about performance, you get a report with green ticks in it. Reports are also a marketing skill.

The honest version of this sounds like: "we do strategy, brand and design, and we work with a developer who handles the build." I respect that enormously. It's rare.

"Free websites" are the most expensive thing you'll ever accept

Nobody builds you a website for free. They build something for free and keep the thing that matters.

The WordPress version has been running for years. Free build, then hosting at four times the going rate, a maintenance retainer, a plugin subscription, and a charge every time you want a paragraph changed. The site is a customer acquisition cost for them and you're the recurring revenue.

The AI era version is newer and worse. Free or near free site, generated in an afternoon, sitting on a platform you don't control, with no code handover, no documentation, and no technical person attached to it at all. The pitch works because it sounds like the future. What you actually bought is a demo.

Either way, ask these questions before you accept anything free:

  • Who owns the domain registration?
  • Who owns the code?
  • Can I take this to another provider tomorrow?
  • What does it cost me monthly, and for how long?
  • What happens to my site if you stop trading?

If you don't own your domain and you can't export your site, you don't have a website. You have a tenancy, and your landlord sets the rent.

I've migrated businesses off these arrangements. The cost of leaving is deliberately high. That's the design.

What it's costing you

Here's what I actually see when a business has been through two or three of these.

A site that loads slowly enough that a third of mobile visitors leave before they see anything. Content written to fill a template rather than to answer what customers ask. An enquiry form going to an inbox nobody monitors. No ability to publish anything without raising a request. No analytics worth reading. Rankings that quietly eroded over two rebuilds because nobody handled redirects.

None of that shows up as a line item. It shows up as a quiet business.

Your website isn't a brochure. It's the only employee you have that works every night and every public holiday. Hire accordingly.

To be clear about AI

I'm not anti AI. I use it every day and it's made me considerably faster.

The distinction is who's holding it. An experienced developer with AI is a developer with leverage. A marketer with AI is a marketer producing code they cannot evaluate. Same tool, opposite outcome, and from the outside the two are indistinguishable until something breaks.

Knowing what's missing is the job. A model will build exactly what it was asked for and will never tell you what you forgot to ask.

My position

25 years of this. The first site I built received 10,000 visitors every week.

Hundreds of sites and systems delivered, from auto electricians and Airbnb hosts through to global brands and government departments.

I still configure the servers. I still read the logs. When something breaks on a site I built, I fix it, rather than opening a ticket on your behalf and forwarding you the reply.

If you've got a nagging feeling that your site isn't representing you properly, or that the person who built it can't answer basic questions about it, that feeling is usually correct.

Send me the URL. I'll tell you straight what I find, including if the answer is that it's fine.