What to Consider Before Hiring a Web Designer: The Different Types of Web Designers

If you’ve ever tried to hire a web designer and found yourself wondering why every designer seems to offer something completely different, you’re not imagining it. “Web designer” is a surprisingly broad job title, and two people using it can have completely different backgrounds, skill sets, processes, and ideas about what makes a website successful.

One designer might be incredibly focused on typography, color, animation, and creating something visually unforgettable. Another might spend most of your discovery call asking about your customers and how they move through your website. Someone else might immediately start talking about conversion rates, integrations, custom functionality, or the platform your site should be built on. Technically, all of these people can call themselves web designers.

This is why I don’t think choosing a web designer should come down to scrolling through portfolios until you find the prettiest one. Obviously, you should like their work. You’re about to pay them a lot of money to design something for you. But you should also understand what they’re actually good at and whether those strengths line up with the problem you need them to solve.

There’s a lot of overlap between these categories, and most good designers will pull from more than one of them. Think of these less as official types of web designers and more as different backgrounds and perspectives you’re likely to come across while looking for the right person.

The visual-first web designer

These are often the designers you stumble across on Instagram or Pinterest and immediately think, Ohhhh, I want THAT.

Visual-first designers tend to be incredibly strong when it comes to typography, layout, color, art direction, animation, and creating a website with a really distinctive point of view. If you already have a strong brand and want a website that feels creative, unexpected, and visually memorable, this kind of designer can be a great fit.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting a beautiful website. I am a designer and an artist. I would be deeply concerned if you hired me and didn’t care what your website looked like. The question I would ask when looking through this type of portfolio is whether the thinking goes beyond the visual design.

Can you easily understand what the business does? Does the navigation make sense? Is there a clear path toward booking, buying, or reaching out? Does the mobile experience get the same level of attention as the giant desktop mockup you saw on Instagram?

A visually impressive website can absolutely be a strategically great website. In fact, I think the best ones are. You just want to make sure you’re getting both.

The brand-first web designer

Some web designers come from a branding or graphic design background, which means they’re particularly good at taking an established brand identity and translating it into an entire digital experience.

That goes beyond putting your logo in the corner and using your brand colors for the buttons. A strong brand-focused designer is thinking about how typography, photography, color, graphics, copy, layout, and all those little visual details work together to make your website actually feel like your business.

This can be especially valuable if one of your biggest frustrations with your current website is that it technically works, but it could belong to almost anyone. Maybe you have a great brand already and your website isn’t doing it justice, or maybe you’re working with someone on your branding and website together and want the two to feel completely connected.

If personality and differentiation are important to your business, I would pay close attention to whether the designer can create something that feels specific to each client or whether every website in their portfolio has essentially the same visual personality.

The UX-focused web designer

This is where my UX designer brain gets very happy.

UX stands for user experience, and a UX-focused web designer is thinking about what happens when an actual human being lands on your website. Instead of only asking what the website should look like, they’re thinking about why someone came there, what they need to know, what might confuse them, what could make them hesitate, and what information they need before they feel comfortable taking the next step.

That thinking can influence everything from the navigation and page structure to where certain information appears and how your services are explained. It also means paying attention to things like mobile usability, because the experience you carefully designed on a laptop still needs to make sense when someone is looking at it on a five-inch screen.

Sometimes UX gets associated with very clean, very corporate, very serious-looking websites, and I reject that premise entirely. Good UX and interesting visual design are not opposites. You can make something weird, colorful, unexpected, and full of personality while still making it incredibly easy for someone to use.

For me, that’s actually where website design gets interesting. The goal isn’t to strip away personality in the name of usability. It’s to figure out how to use design intentionally so the personality and the experience work together.

The conversion-focused web designer

A conversion-focused designer is particularly interested in what happens once someone gets to your website. Are they filling out the inquiry form? Booking the appointment? Buying the product? Joining your email list? Downloading your freebie? In other words, is your website successfully getting people to take the action you built it for?

You’ll probably hear more language around calls to action, landing pages, funnels, lead generation, conversion rates, and testing. If you already have a decent amount of traffic coming to your website but people aren’t taking the next step, someone with a strong conversion background may be particularly valuable.

Conversion strategy can also be incredibly useful for businesses that rely heavily on their website to generate sales or leads. That said, I personally think it works best when it’s balanced with the rest of the customer experience. Your website still needs to build trust, communicate your brand, answer questions, and feel good to use. Not every section needs to scream at someone to BUY NOW in order to be doing its job.

The technical web designer or developer

This is where the line between web designer and web developer can start to get a little blurry. Someone with a more technical background may work with custom code, integrations, databases, highly customized e-commerce functionality, or websites that need to do things an out-of-the-box platform simply can’t handle.

For some businesses, this expertise is absolutely necessary and worth paying for. If your website has complicated technical requirements, you want someone who understands how to build them properly rather than trying to force a platform to do something it was never designed to do.

For a lot of small businesses, though, the most technically complicated solution isn’t automatically the best one. If you need a service-based website with a handful of pages, a blog, an inquiry form, and maybe booking or payments, you probably don’t need someone building a completely custom system from the ground up.

This is why one of the first questions I think a business owner should answer before hiring a web designer is simply: What does my website actually need to do? The answer should drive the technology, not the other way around.

So, which type of web designer should you hire?

Probably someone who lives in more than one of these boxes.

These aren’t official job titles, and I wouldn’t expect designers to describe themselves this way. There are brand designers who are fantastic at UX, UX designers with a strong visual point of view, developers who are great designers, and designers who understand conversion strategy. What matters is figuring out which combination of strengths is most important for your particular business.

If you need complicated functionality, technical experience might be high on your list. If you already have a personality-filled brand that completely disappears when someone lands on your website, you might prioritize someone with a strong branding and visual design background. If customers struggle to understand your services or aren’t taking the next step, you may want someone who thinks deeply about UX and conversion.

Sometimes, of course, you need someone who can connect several of those dots.

When you’re looking through a designer’s portfolio, pay attention to more than whether you personally like the aesthetic. Look at the types of problems they solve and how they talk about their work. Can they explain why they made certain decisions? Do they talk about the customer and the business behind the website, or only what the finished design looks like? Does their process seem like it would uncover what your business actually needs?

The website your designer wants to put in their portfolio and the website your customer needs to use should ultimately be the same website.

Where I fit into all of this

My own approach sits somewhere between brand design, UX, and business strategy, which is probably why I have a hard time looking at website design as a purely visual exercise.

I’m an artist and a brand designer, so I care a lot about how a website looks and feels. I want it to have personality. I want the visual decisions to feel connected to the business behind them, and I want someone to land on the site and immediately get a sense of who they’re dealing with. I have zero interest in making every small business look like the same trendy website with different colors swapped in.

At the same time, I’m a UX designer, so while I’m thinking about typography and layouts, I’m also thinking about the person on the other side of the screen. What are they looking for? What do they need to understand before they’re ready to reach out? Where are they likely to get confused? What should they see next? What does this experience look like on their phone?

Working with small businesses adds another layer because I’m thinking about the owner too. I want to know what you need the website to do right now, what you might need it to do as your business grows, and how you’re going to manage the thing once I hand it over to you. There’s no point in building something wildly impressive if it creates a new problem for you six months after launch.

To me, those aren’t separate parts of website design. That is website design. The visual identity, customer experience, functionality, and business strategy should all be working toward the same thing.

Before you choose a web designer

You should absolutely look at portfolios and find someone whose work you’re excited about. Aesthetic fit matters, especially when you’re trusting someone with such a visible part of your business. Just don’t let that be the only thing you’re evaluating.

Pay attention to what a designer seems to care about, the questions they ask, how they explain their decisions, what their process looks like, and what happens after your website launches. Think about the areas where you actually need help and whether their experience lines up with those needs.

You’re not trying to find the objectively best web designer. There isn’t one. You’re trying to find the designer whose combination of skills, perspective, and process makes sense for your business.

Once you start looking at it that way, choosing between a sea of very different web designers gets a whole lot easier.

Hi, it’s me.

Looking for a web designer who thinks about the whole picture?

That’s exactly how I approach custom website design at Chartreuse Studio. I combine brand-forward design, UX, and business strategy to build Squarespace websites that have plenty of personality while still making sense to the people who actually need to use them.

We’ll think about what your website needs to do now, where your business is going next, how your customers will experience it, and how all of that can look really damn good at the same time.

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This article is part of The Small Business Guide to Hiring a Web Designer. If you’re just starting your search, read What to Consider Before Hiring a Web Designer: 5 Questions to Ask Yourself First next.