Who should actually build your website?
It’s an important question to answer for yourself lest you waste money. I’ve sat across from business owners who paid thousands for a site they’re embarrassed to send people to because they’d picked the wrong kind of help for their stage.
I’ve been building websites for coaches since 2018. In this post I’ll compare all four options, freelance developer, agency, DIY, and web design consultant, so you can make the right choice of who to hire for your website build.
Quick Summary
- A web design consultant is built for established coaches who want strategy, design, and a long-term partner in one place. Many consultants, me included, run small boutique agencies.
- A freelance web developer is your best bet for defined technical tasks, when you already know exactly what you need and what it should look like.
- A large web design agency makes sense for medium-sized businesses with big budgets and a team on staff to manage the project.
- A DIY platform fits brand-new coaches who have more time than money.
What’s the difference between a web developer and a web design consultant?
A web developer builds what you tell them to build. A web design consultant tells you what to build, then builds it. The developer’s job ends at working code. The consultant’s job is knowing how to put together a website that helps you have more client conversations. Typically, strategy, messaging, design, and the build are all part of the engagement.
That’s the short version.
The distinction between the two options is simply this: when you hire a developer, you’re the strategist. You decide what pages you need and what the copy says. You map out how visitors move from reading your blog to booking a call. The developer executes your plan, and the quality of the result depends heavily on the quality of your plan.
Here’s an example from my own client work. Coaches often come to me with their homepage copy already drafted, and it usually leads with their certifications and their coaching philosophy. A developer would build the page exactly as written.
But I’ll gently push back on that homepage outline because visitors skim right past credentials if they’re the first thing listed. What really earns a visitor’s trust is seeing their own problem named on the page. So before we design, we restructure the copy using the StoryBrand framework, so the site leads with your client’s problem and your plan to solve it.
One of my clients put it this way: “You’re not just a web developer. You’re consulting me on what I should do with my website.” That’s the difference between a developer and a consultant.
What are your four options for getting a website built?
We’ve discussed two primary options, but there are in reality four for getting your site built: hire a freelance web developer for hourly or per-project work, bring in a large web design agency, build it yourself on a DIY platform, or work with a web design consultant who owns both strategy and build. Each one is right for a different situation and budget, and each has a distinct failure mode.
Option 1: A freelance web developer
This is hourly or fixed-bid task work, often found through Upwork, Fiverr, or a referral. You describe the work, they do the work.
Best for: defined technical tasks with clear requirements, like migrating your site to a new host or fixing a broken checkout. If you can write the task as a checklist, a freelancer is often the most cost-effective option.
What you’re really signing up for: being the project manager. You’ll need a handle on your content and strategy before you post the job, because the developer won’t supply it. You’ll also need to keep communication flowing and check in on progress, and it’s on you to gauge language and time-zone fit before you commit.
One tactic that works: don’t just post a job and wait. Search out developers yourself and invite around 20 of them to pitch. The best people on those platforms are busy, so they’re not always scanning the job board.
Option 2: A large web design agency
A big agency gives you departments: a design team, a development team, and an account manager to coordinate them on your behalf. There’s often a physical office too, with the overhead built into your quote.
Best for: larger businesses with complex sites, bigger budgets, and someone on staff who can manage the relationship. If you’re running a company with multiple service lines and serious traffic, that bench depth is a genuine advantage.
The tradeoff: you’re one account among many, and you’ll mostly talk to the account manager while different specialists rotate through each phase of your project. The process itself is usually solid (I run a structured process too, and it matters). What changes at a big agency is the relationship: no one person stays close to your business from kickoff through launch. Worth knowing: not every agency is a 50-person shop. Small boutique agencies work very differently, and I’ll cover those under option 4, because the best ones are led by a consultant.
Option 3: A DIY website platform
Squarespace, Wix, Showit, or a WordPress template. You build it yourself.
Best for: brand-new coaches who haven’t signed consistent clients yet. Honestly. If you’re pre-revenue or close to it, I’d rather see you put up a clean one-page site yourself than go into debt for a custom build. Your website matters, but at that stage, getting coaching reps matters more. I’ve written about when it’s time to move past DIY.
The tradeoff: your time, and a ceiling. A DIY platform hands you the tools but not the strategy, so you’re still the one deciding what goes on the page. The builders themselves are genuinely good, and I build client sites on some of these same platforms. What no template can tell you is what your homepage should say or how to turn a visitor into a consult.
Option 4: A web design consultant
This is where I’ve planted my flag, so factor that in as you read. A web design consultant combines the strategy layer (what your site needs to say and do to get you clients) with the design and build, and sticks around afterward as your ongoing website partner.
One clarification, because the label can be misleading: a consultant isn’t necessarily a solo act. My business is a small boutique web design agency. You work one-on-one with me from the first strategy call through launch, and I stay your point of contact the whole way, while my team handles development, maintenance, and support behind the scenes. It’s the personal attention of a freelancer with the backup of a team.
Best for: established coaches and consultants whose business has outgrown their website. You have offers that sell and testimonials to prove it, plus a clear niche. What you don’t have is the time or desire to become your own web strategist, and you want one accountable partner who owns the whole outcome.
I don’t really sell websites. I sell a marketing platform plus my experience of what works for a coach’s digital strategy, and then my team and I stay on as the go-to website people afterward. I’m StoryBrand certified, so clarifying your message and how to speak to your niche is part of the package. And my team maintains over 100 sites on monthly website care plans, which tells you we’re dependable long-term.
The tradeoff: cost, and trust. This is a bigger investment than a freelancer or DIY, and it only works if you let the consultant do the job you hired them for. A site that’s half the designer’s strategy and half your after-the-fact edits ends up looking like two websites stitched together.
How much does each option cost?
Rough 2026 ranges, before the caveats:
- Freelance web developer: $65 to $150 per hour in the States, lower overseas, $250+ for true specialists. It depends heavily on expertise.
- Large agency: typically starts around $10,000 and can climb well past $50,000.
- DIY platform: $16 to $50 a month, plus your time.
- Web design consultant: generally between the freelancer and the big agency, with strategy included.
A few notes on those numbers.
Freelancer pricing is deceptive in both directions. A $40/hour developer who needs 60 hours and three rounds of rework isn’t cheaper than a $100/hour developer who needs 20. And none of those hours include the strategy work, because you’re doing that part yourself.
Agency quotes are built for agency clients. If a proposal includes custom illustration and an eight-week discovery phase, ask what the site is supposed to do before you ask what it costs.
My projects run from about $5,000 for a focused one-page build to around $15,000 for a full site with brand design, and include the messaging strategy, the design and build, and a plan for what happens after launch. That puts my boutique agency in the middle of the market: the strategic, conversion-focused work you’d expect from a StoryBrand agency, without the large agency price tag. I’ve broken the full website design cost numbers down separately, including where every dollar goes.
Where these projects go wrong
I’ve done a lot of consults with coaches who came to me after a website project went sideways. The stories repeat. Almost every one falls into one of three patterns.
The disappearing freelancer
A coach came to me for a consult last summer. She’d worked with the same freelance developer since 2021, and for years he was great. He was responsive and affordable, and he knew her site inside out.
Then he stopped answering. Three months went by with no reply to her emails and no offer to handoff the site to anyone else. Meanwhile she was planning a rebrand and had an event on the calendar that her website needed to support. Her whole web presence was frozen because her developer ghosted her.
And she did nothing wrong. Solo freelancers get sick, take full-time jobs, burn out, or just move on. When your entire website depends on one person’s inbox, you’ve built on a single point of failure. That’s why the question I ask in every consult is “What’s your plan for maintenance after launch?”
The agency that overbuilds
The second pattern is the coach who hired a big agency and got a beautiful, expensive site that doesn’t fit her business. In eight years of doing this, I can tell you that when a website turns out badly, it almost always comes back to one of two things: the designer didn’t understand the owner’s industry, or the owner didn’t trust the designer enough to let them work.
Large agencies are especially prone to the first one. A team that mostly builds for manufacturers and med spas will happily take a coach’s money, but they don’t know what a coaching sales page needs to say. To be clear, more pages can absolutely be the right call, and I recommend them myself when each page has a job to do. The problem is when nobody on the project can tell you why a page exists or what it should get a visitor to do.
The developer who does exactly what you say
The third pattern is the sneaky one, because nothing visibly breaks. You hire an hourly developer, hand over your list of requests, and get precisely what you asked for.
The problem is that some of what you asked for was wrong because you’re not a website expert, and that’s not your fault. That certifications-first homepage I mentioned earlier is the classic example. A task-based developer typically doesn’t have the expertise to challenge it.
A good website consultant should be asking you questions that make you think. If nobody in your project is doing that, you’re the strategist, whether you meant to be or not.
What if a freelancer is all your budget allows right now?
Then hire the freelancer, with your eyes open. An inexpensive build can absolutely get you by if you supply the strategy and manage the project yourself, with a developer whose communication you’ve tested. What you save in cash, you usually spend in your own hours. That’s a fair trade at the beginning of a coaching business, but often a bad one later on.
If you go this route, a few things will protect you:
- Have your strategy set first. Know your pages, your copy, and how visitors become clients before you post the job. The developer won’t know what a coaching website needs, and it’s not fair to expect them to.
- Act like a project manager. Set a schedule for updates and keep communication constant. Freelancers juggle multiple clients, and the squeaky wheel ships first.
- Test communication before you hire. Email back and forth a few times. If instructions get misread in a two-line message, they’ll get misread in a project brief.
- Know your tech before you start. Your platform, your scheduler, your email tool, your payment processor. Changing these mid-project is where budgets get blown out of proportion.
On that last one: if you’re not sure which tools you actually need, grab my free Life Coach’s Tech Roadmap. It covers the only five pieces of tech a coach needs to run an online business without the overwhelm.
How do you decide who to hire?
Match the hire to your stage. Pre-revenue: DIY. Defined technical task and a tight budget: freelance developer, with you as strategist. Large company with a marketing team: big agency. Established coach whose website is behind their business, and who wants strategy plus a long-term partner: that’s when a web design consultant is my vote for you.
A few questions to make it concrete:
- Can you write the project as a checklist? If yes, a freelancer can build it. If the honest answer is “I don’t know what the site needs,” you need strategy first.
- Who answers the phone in two years? Websites need updates and security attention, plus changes as your offers evolve. If the answer is “nobody,” budget for that reality now.
- Do you trust this person enough to be challenged? If you’re already planning to override their decisions after handoff, save your money and DIY it.
- Is your business ready? A custom site amplifies a business that’s already working. If the offers aren’t selling consistently yet, start there.
Frequently Asked Questions About Hiring a Web Design Consultant
What’s the difference between a web designer and a web developer?
A web designer decides how a site looks and feels: layout, color, typography, and user experience. A web developer writes the code that makes it function. Many freelancers do both. A web design consultant adds a third layer, business strategy, deciding what the site should say and do before design or development starts.
Is a web design consultant worth the cost?
For an established coach or consultant, usually yes. You pay once, to one accountable partner, and the strategy and the finished build are both covered. With a developer, you’d be supplying the strategy yourself. For brand-new coaches without consistent clients, it’s often too early. Start simpler and upgrade when your business outgrows the site.
What should I do if my web designer disappeared?
First, secure your access: hosting account, domain registrar, and CMS login. If you’re missing any of those, your host’s support team can usually verify ownership and help. Then get a current backup of the site. Only after that should you look for a new website partner, ideally one with a team behind them.
Can I start on a DIY platform and hire a consultant later?
Yes, and it’s often the right sequence. A clean DIY site is enough while you validate your offers and sign your first clients. When your revenue is steady and the site is clearly behind your business, that’s the right time to bring in a professional. Nothing from the DIY phase is wasted.
How do I know if a web design consultant understands my industry?
Look at their portfolio for businesses like yours, and evaluate it critically. Do the hero sections speak to a specific audience? Is the messaging distinct from site to site, or interchangeable? Then notice the sales conversation itself. A real consultant asks about your offers and clients before ever talking about page counts.
So, who should build your website?
There’s no universally right answer, just the right answer for your stage. A freelance web developer, a large agency, a DIY platform, and a web design consultant are all legitimate choices. What matters is going in with clear eyes about what each one includes and what each one quietly leaves on your plate.
Whichever way you go, you deserve a website you’re proud to send people to.
If you’re an established coach and you want a strategic partner for the whole thing, strategy through build and beyond, learn more about my web design services for coaches. And if you’re just getting started and need to keep costs low, the Website Kit for Coaches was made for exactly that.
I hope this post was helpful!
Read more: How to Know When It’s Time to Build Your Coaching Website
