You are looking at three portfolios and they all look fine. Every one of them shows finished work, photographed on a good day, and none of them shows you what the year after the launch was like.

A website is one of those purchases you cannot inspect before it exists. What you can inspect is the arrangement around it, and most of that is knowable before you sign anything.

Ask whose name goes on the accounts

Your domain name is registered to somebody, and that somebody is called the registrant. ICANN, the organization that oversees the domain name system, is direct about what the registrant carries: “You will assume sole responsibility for the registration and use of your domain name.”

It is equally direct about what you are entitled to see. “You are entitled to review this Registration Agreement at any time, and download a copy for your records.”

Ask who will be listed as the registrant of your domain. Ownership, access and account control are three different things, and what you actually own when your website is finished separates them. Then ask a separate question about the hosting, which is the service that keeps the website online. On that one you want to know in whose name the account is opened and who is able to sign in to it. Holding a name and controlling an account are two different things, and running them together is where the confusion usually starts.

There are arrangements where somebody else holds the hosting account on your behalf, and those are ordinary and often sensible, particularly where the hosting is managed for you. What matters is that you know which arrangement you are in and that it was a decision rather than an accident.

Ask what happens to those accounts if you part company later. The answer given cheerfully at the start is the one you want on record, because it is a much harder conversation to have for the first time at the end.

Ask to see something old

Anybody can show you what they launched last month. A website built two or three years ago and still doing its job tells you something a new one cannot, which is that it survived contact with real use.

Ask for a couple of those, and ask one question alongside them: what they did on each and whether anybody else has worked on it since. Websites change hands, and what you are looking at today may not be what they handed over. Once you know that, go and look. Do the pages still load quickly. Does the content look like somebody has kept it up, or has it been frozen since the day it went live. If a website has clearly been left alone, that is worth asking about rather than counting against anybody, because the owner may have chosen exactly that.

Ask how you will reach them

Most of what you will need after launch is small, and what it costs to keep a website running covers what that ongoing arrangement usually involves. A price changes, a photograph goes out of date, a member of staff leaves. What you want to know is how those reach the people doing the work, and what the answer looks like when the person you usually deal with is on vacation or off sick.

Ask what the route is, whether you have somewhere to send a request rather than a single personal e-mail address, and how quickly you can expect an answer. Those have real answers, and hearing them now is a good deal easier than working them out on the day you need something fixed.

Ask about accessibility

Accessibility is whether people using a screen reader, a keyboard instead of a mouse, or a screen at high magnification can actually use your website. It is not an add-on, and it has a published standard behind it.

That standard is WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, published by the World Wide Web Consortium. Its stated purpose is to give web content one shared standard that works for individuals, organizations and governments internationally, rather than a different rule in every country.

WCAG is graded rather than simply passed or failed. It sets three levels of conformance, A, AA and AAA, where A is the minimum and each level includes everything in the one below it. Ask which level they build to and how they check. You do not need to follow the technical answer in detail. What the answer gives you is a sense of how familiar the ground is, which is a first impression rather than proof, and it is worth having before you ask anybody to put anything in writing. Once a written quote does arrive, what a website quote should tell you covers how to read it.

Listen to how a question gets answered

Pick one subject you have taken the trouble to understand, and ask about it. Hosting is a good one, and so is how updates get applied.

You are not setting a trap. You are finding out what happens when you ask a question that has a real answer, and whether you get an explanation you can follow or a reassurance that moves past it. One conversation is one conversation, and it will not tell you how the next year goes. Have a second if you want a better read of it.

What all of it adds up to

None of these questions is technical, and none of them requires you to know how a website is built. Each one has an answer that is either ready or not, and the pattern across the answers usually tells you more than any single one of them.

The decision is still yours to make, and reasonable people land in different places. What you are trying to avoid is choosing in the dark and finding out how the arrangement works only when something has already gone wrong.

If you would like to talk through what you need before you go out and ask anybody, e-mail sales@allydrez.com.