Episode 048: Why working with a web developer can be so frustrating (and how to make it easier)

Is your web developer frustrating you? Is this a normal thing to expect when embarking on a website project? Whether you’re hiring your first web designer or planning a website refresh, this episode will help you feel more prepared, ask the right questions, and avoid common pitfalls.

Here’s what’s going on, why, and what you can do to minimise stress and ensure a smooth project.

What you’ll learn:

• Why your website might not look how you expected—and how to fix it
• The hidden work that comes after launch
• Tips to make the process smoother from start to finish

Perfect for: Small business owners, solo entrepreneurs, and anyone hiring a web developer for the first time.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts.

Transcript:

Introduction

Let me know if you relate to this. So you contact a web developer, you start working with them, and then—uh—three weeks later, they show you a preview of the new website that they’re building for you and—um—it doesn’t look like what you pictured in your mind. Does that sound familiar?

So I’m going to talk about why sometimes working with a web developer can feel complicated, uncomfortable, sometimes even frustrating. What is going on, and is there anything that you can do to make the process smoother and easier and get closer to the outcomes that you want?

Specifically, we’re going to talk about mismatches of skills and interpretations. And I’m also going to touch on some “you don’t know what you don’t know” moments, and hopefully, this will help you work towards a smoother website project.

Why These Problems Happen

So let me start by unpacking why these problems might happen. Putting together a website is not just about putting some words and pixels on a screen—especially if you’re working with someone experienced. Our job is not just to present some information about you, but the job of a website, ideally, should be to persuade or nudge somebody into working with you or buying your product.

And yeah, there are some tools out there that make it look really easy. You could even use AI, something like ChatGPT, to build a page for you. But the thing is, if you don’t know how to structure your website, if you don’t know where to start, that’s okay. And that also could prevent you from even beginning to do the project.

A lot of people sort of have an idea of what looks aesthetically nice. But also, there is still something deeper to it than just understanding what looks good. The more that we need to know and understand is the psychology—understand the psychology of what makes somebody want to be interested in interacting with this website and learning about you and buying your stuff.

When It Doesn’t Match What You Imagined

So let’s dive into what to do and what it means when your designer or your developer comes back with something that doesn’t look like what you imagined. This is a very common mistake. So if it happens to you, don’t worry—someone else has probably also experienced this as well. And it is something that I’ve also had to deal with in my own career.

Do Your Research

One thing that is very important is that some research needs to be done before you actually choose to go ahead with working with a developer or a designer. And so for some business owners, it is important to them to explore their past work, explore their portfolio. In some cases, it may also be beneficial to work with someone who’s either worked with a business like yours before or—and/or—they’ve got a sort of personal style or aesthetic style that resonates with you.

Yeah, I did mention about things looking good, and that certainly is important. But again, there needs to be a sort of interplay between things looking attractive and aesthetic in terms of the graphics and typography—and also leading the customer down on the journey. So those are all things to consider.

Gathering Website Inspiration

If it helps at all—and this is something that I ask when I’m onboarding someone—it may be a good idea to go and look at some other websites that you like. They don’t necessarily have to be in your field of work, but take some time to explore them and take some notes about what you like about them or if there’s anything you don’t like about them.

And don’t just think about it in terms of personal style preferences, but also, if you get the moment to think about this, think about how that visual look and feel works for your business and convincing people to buy from you.

Visual Identity and Branding

If required, there may also be another exercise in terms of nailing a visual look and feel that connects to your brand and what you stand for. That extended exercise goes out of the scope of what a web developer can do and it may require the assistance of a brand designer.

If you decide to go ahead on that path, the brand designer will help get this cohesive visual look and feel that you can then pass to your web developer and say, “Hey, these are the design elements that I like and that represent me and my brand. Now I want this to be interpreted in a web design”—and ideally, it gets interpreted into a web design that your customers actually connect and resonate with.

Clear communication and well-defined project scopes are essential to avoid the frustrating situations a web developer might encounter. When clients and developers are aligned, the development process is smoother and more efficient.

Feedback and Collaboration

Another positive thing to look out for when collaborating on the design—again, well, firstly, an important word is collaboration—but don’t be afraid to ask for feedback and/or ask for an opportunity to give feedback if you’re not given one.

I provide, in my process, opportunities to ask for feedback, and they’re very helpful. And don’t be afraid to ask questions. People will say, “At the end of the day, it’s your website and you get final say.”

So it’s an interesting thing to reconcile. When I make a decision in a design, it’s not just my own personal taste—it’s what I’ve been taught will get customers interested in clicking the “Book” or “Buy Now” button.

So if need be, it’s a good idea to just talk out whether or not those aesthetic choices are what you need. And in the end of it all, we do want to produce something that actually works.

What’s Actually Involved in a Website

Let’s talk about the scope and understanding what is actually involved. Again, it might look like you’re just sort of assembling some pictures and some text, but it’s not uncommon to be stuck on understanding and deciding what to actually collect. And what if you don’t have any copy or text written? How do you figure out how much you need to write, or what pictures to use?

These are some things that can hold a project up. It can definitely complicate things. It could even be a barrier to getting started in some cases.

How Much Text or Imagery Do You Need?

If you’re not sure how much copy—how much text—to write, my rule of thumb is the word count needs to be long enough so that it gets the point across and gets somebody into your cart or into your booking calendar.

You may have heard something about word counts and SEO—and the more words you put on the page, the higher it’ll rank in SEO, or for conversions, the longer the page is the better your conversion rate will be. But I’m going to be honest: in this age, in 2025, that’s BS.

So I’ll reiterate what I said before: the amount of words that you need is enough to get your point across. The number of pages you need is enough to get the point across—enough to make that person understand not only what you do, but make your customer understand that you understand their problem and they’re comfortable taking the next step with you.

In some cases, that may require 3,000 words. But in other cases, it might not need to be that long.

Consider Help With Copywriting

It also helps to consider what sort of imagery—and whether or not you need videos. And yeah, as with word count, it’s not really about whether you have a 30-minute video or whether you have a video at all or whether you have five pictures or 500 pictures. The amount that you need is the amount that gets the point across.

So don’t overcomplicate it if it doesn’t need to be complicated. If you are feeling pressed for time, or you don’t really—how can I say this—you don’t really consider yourself a writer, but you do need to get points across, it may be worthwhile adding a copywriting component onto your website project.

Because that way, the copywriter—especially if they are trained in writing copy for websites—they will write in a way that gets the message across to your target audience.

A Tangible Example

To put this in a more tangible sense: you could be a dentist and you could be really proud of all the things that you’ve learned and techniques that you’ve studied, and you could go on for ages about how tooth decay works or how your products protect your teeth and all that sort of stuff.

But at the end of the day, what your customer or your patient wants from you is quite simple. They want their teeth to stop hurting. They want their smile to look good.

So if you think that you need to sit down and write 3,000 words about how an X-ray works, that may not be the best use of your time. And if that kind of thing just doesn’t occur to you, then it’s totally valid to get some help writing that content.

Trusting the Experts

When you are getting other people involved, you are going to have to sort of allow a little bit of grace—not only in terms of waiting for someone else to do the thing but also trusting that person to provide something that gets the job done.

Even though you could potentially save some money by doing it yourself or save time by not having to go back and forth with revisions, at the end of the day, if you’re approaching someone to develop a website and/or someone to represent your brand with images or writing, their job is to do it in such a way that gets you sales.

And if your expertise is in coaching people or healing people or working on their teeth, you know your job is how to fix people—but your website has a job in generating bookings or making sales, and that may not be your thing. So you may need to get someone else to help you with that.

Google Access and Ownership of Assets

One thing that doesn’t really—I don’t see this come across very much—but it’s granting access to Google accounts. It may not seem immediately relevant, but there are certain things that you may need later down the road which will require—and I’m sorry to use technical language here—but Google API access.

Another way of putting this is: there are certain features on websites such as contact forms and anti-spam and Google Maps that will require not only to have a Google account, but somebody with the tech knowledge to understand how to set this up.

In an ideal world, your business will have its own Google account so that you can own these assets. It may not make sense to you now, but just bear in mind that there are maybe some Google services such as Analytics and Search Console and Maps, and you may also need this in order to send and receive contact form messages through your website.

You may also require your web developer or your marketing person access to these things. So you may not immediately need it, but just bear in mind that that is something that you should own—a Google account—and make sure that you invite your person in as a collaborator, rather than sharing your username and password, because that can hold things up as well.

Own Your Website Assets

Likewise, a thing that you don’t know—that you probably don’t know that you don’t know—is owning your assets. Assets being your domain.

So your domain is one asset—that’s yourname.com, yourname.com.au—that is a registration of your name, that is your asset, that should belong to your business.

Another asset in your business is your hosting. So your domain is the name. The hosting is where all the files and pages go. And this could be on something like VentraIP or Squarespace or Shopify. Those are hosts.

Your business should also be the owner of this account, as well as your domain. It may seem easy to just hand this off to someone else because you don’t understand it, and that’s all understandable. You may not have any idea what to do with these things. But even if you don’t know what to do with those things, make sure that your business or you own them—that the accounts are in your name, that the billing details are yours—and where feasible and possible, invite your marketing person or your developer in as a collaborator.

What Happens After the Website Launch?

Okay, so final frustrating thing I want to talk about is understanding what happens after the website is finished. So hitting the “Go” button, hitting the “Publish” button, unlocking all the pages—publishing it—doesn’t mean that everything’s finished.

There’s going to be some work involved in terms of making sure things are working well behind the scenes. You may also require some extra services in terms of marketing or advertising your business and getting people to come to your website.

It’s a good idea to check with your web developer if you’re not sure what kind of help there is after your website, because—yeah—usually, generally speaking, that fee that you pay one-off to get the website made may not include ongoing help. So make sure that’s all spelled out before you proceed.

Final Thoughts

So to conclude, I think it is a good idea to treat your web designer or developer like a collaborator. If you just want them to follow exactly the way that you want them to work and you want them to build a website exactly to your specifications, then probably what you want is an employee—or you can get ChatGPT to do that.

As for me, my clients trust me to make the creative and technical decisions for them. So at the end of the day, I would like to produce websites that fulfill a purpose in your business. Yeah, I want it to work for your customers.

And sometimes with a brand, yeah, you might have to put your personal preferences—just, you don’t have to throw them completely out—just give it a bit of wiggle room. And also, if you are entrusting someone else to do this for you, understand that they’ve got experience and expertise and knowledge. Be open to their suggestions. They’ve built many websites before, and hopefully they’ve built websites that have actually helped businesses make more money and get more customers.

If at any point anything feels wobbly or you’re not sure, you don’t have to follow step-by-step-by-step exactly. Be okay with asking questions and asking for a chat, asking for clarity.

At the end of the day, I’m a human being. I’m a person. I’m sure whoever you work with is also a human. And sometimes things can get lost in translation over emails and documents. So yeah, don’t hesitate to ask for clarification at any point.

If You’re Starting a New Project

If your project is taking longer than expected or it’s not turning up the way you thought it would, just know that there are other people who are experiencing this as well. So it’s not just you. It happens to a lot of people and there’s always a way to resolve things. So don’t be afraid to reach out and communicate.

Here’s a bit of advice: if you are thinking about a new project, start taking note of some websites that you not only like the look of but you enjoy using as well—you find easy to use. Take some notes, take some screenshots, save the URL—the address of these websites—keep them somewhere safe and somewhere you’ll remember them so that when you’re ready to start the project, you’ll have something to work with.

Closing

I hope you found this helpful, and if you’ve got any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. If you found this useful, I’d love it if you’d share it with someone in your network who you think may benefit from hearing this. Cheers.