Most bad website projects were predictable from the first meeting. Nobody asked what the site had to accomplish, the proposal priced pages instead of outcomes, and nothing in writing said who would own the domain afterwards.

This is the vetting process, in the order you should run it. It is written for an Ottawa buyer, which changes three things: the local supply is unusually varied, bilingual capability is a real requirement for some of you, and public-sector adjacency means accessibility and procurement questions land earlier here.

Before you contact anyone, write down what the site has to do

Two sentences is enough. "Phone has to ring from Kanata homeowners searching for emergency plumbing" is a brief. "A modern, professional web presence" is not, and a vendor cannot quote it, so they will quote their standard package instead.

Write down the three things you need the site to produce, who the visitor is, and the hard deadline if one exists. You now have the document that makes every quote comparable.

The ownership questions, asked first

These four questions sort the field faster than any portfolio review. Ask them by email so the answers are in writing.

Who owns the source code when the final invoice is paid? The answer you want is you, outright, with the repository transferred or accessible to you from day one.
Whose name is on the domain registration? Yours, as registrant, in an account you control. A developer registering your domain in their own account is extremely common and causes real pain later.
Who controls DNS? You should at minimum hold the registrar login. An agency managing DNS on your behalf is fine; an agency being the only party who can change DNS is a single point of failure in your business.
Who holds the hosting account and the analytics property? Same principle. Access in your name, with the vendor added as a user.

A vendor who answers all four cleanly has probably been through a handover before. A vendor who says "we handle all that for you, you don't need to worry about it" is describing a situation where leaving them is expensive. If you are already in that situation, getting your domain and site back from an agency walks through the recovery.

What a real scoping conversation sounds like

A developer worth hiring will spend the first call asking you questions, not describing their process. Expect to be asked:

What happens when a customer contacts you now, and where does that break down?
Which pages on the current site get traffic, and do you have Search Console or analytics access?
Who writes the content, and does that person have time?
What do you need to be able to change yourself after launch?
Is French in scope?
Does anything about this site have to satisfy a funder, a regulator or a procurement process?

If none of those come up, the quote that follows is an industry average rather than a price for your project. Our own scoping approach is described in how we brief and price web development in Ottawa, and what drives the price is covered in what a website costs in Ottawa.

How to read a portfolio

Portfolios are curated. Read them like evidence rather than advertising.

Open the live sites. Are the sites they showed you still online, still looking like the mockup, and still maintained? Work from four years ago that has fallen apart tells you about their handover quality.

Test one on your phone, on cellular. Slow and awkward on mobile is the most common defect in Ottawa small business sites, and it is visible in ten seconds.

Run one through a free Lighthouse or PageSpeed check. Look for a pattern across several of their sites rather than a perfect score on one.

Check the HTML. View source on one of their builds. Real headings, alt text on images, a sensible page title. A two-minute proxy for whether they build accessibly by habit.

Look for work in your situation rather than your industry. A developer who has built a bilingual membership site has solved problems closer to yours than one who has built five sites for other dentists.

References, asked properly

Ask for two references: one recent client, and one from two or more years ago. The second is the useful one. Then ask them three questions:

Did the project land on the timeline you were given, and if not, what caused the slip?
What happened the first time you needed something changed after launch?
If you left tomorrow, do you have everything you would need?

That last question has produced more honest answers than any other on this list.

Red flags

A quote with no questions attached. Covered above, and it is the strongest signal on this page.

Guaranteed first-page rankings. Nobody controls Google's results. A guarantee means either a meaningless target ("first page for your own business name") or a vendor who will tell you other things that are untrue.

Monthly fees with no deliverable attached. "Maintenance and SEO, $600/month" needs a definition. Ask what is delivered each month and what report you receive.

Proprietary platform lock-in. Some firms build only on their own CMS, which means your site cannot move. If this is the model, the lifetime cost includes never being able to leave, and that should be priced in your head.

No written scope, or a scope listing pages without listing functionality. Change orders live in the gap.

Reluctance to put ownership in writing. The vendor has thought about this and does not like the answer.

No accessibility answer. If you sell to the public sector, a vendor with nothing to say about WCAG is a procurement risk. See accessibility as a procurement requirement for Ottawa suppliers.

Solo developer, small studio, or large firm

All three work, and the trade-offs are stable. A solo developer is cheapest and gives you direct access to the person building; the risk is capacity, which you mitigate by insisting on code in a repository you own. A small studio gives you continuity across a few people and a wider skill set, at a middling cost — check that the person in the sales meeting is involved in the build. A large firm gives you process and the ability to satisfy procurement paperwork, which you pay for, and a small project there will be staffed by juniors.

The last check

Hire the vendor most willing to tell you something you did not want to hear. The developer who said your page count was too high, or that your real problem was content rather than design, or that the budget would not cover what you described, is giving you information instead of agreement.

If you are weighing options for web development in Ottawa, we are happy to be one of the three quotes, and happy to tell you when a project does not need us. Get in touch with the two-sentence brief and we will respond with questions first.

Common questions

Does the developer need to be in Ottawa?

For a straightforward site, no. Local matters when your visibility depends on local search, when French nuance for the Gatineau market is in play, or when you want someone who can sit in a room with you.

How long should choosing take?

Two to four weeks for a small business site. Get three quotes, run the ownership questions, check references. Rushing this is how people end up with a vendor they cannot leave.

Should I pay for a discovery phase?

For anything with custom functionality, paid discovery is usually money well spent, because it produces a specification you own and can take to other vendors. For a five-page brochure site it is unnecessary.

What if I already have a developer and things are going badly?

Get your access first — domain, DNS, hosting, repository, analytics — before you raise the problem. Then have the conversation. Doing it in the other order has gone badly for people.

How do I check a vendor's SEO claims?

Ask which of their client sites rank for which terms, then search those terms yourself from a logged-out browser. Also ask what they would measure at 90 days. A vendor who names impressions, position and conversions is working from evidence; one who promises traffic growth with no baseline is not. Our Ottawa SEO service page describes the measurements we use.

how to choose an ottawa web development company