Questions to ask before commissioning a corporate website

Ownership: who owns the domain, code and content?

One of the most common problems we see is a domain or hosting account registered in the name of an agency or a former employee rather than the business itself. When the relationship ends, that can leave you badly stuck.

Before work begins, make sure the contract states that the domain will be registered to your organisation and that the source code and content will be handed over to you. You should hold the admin credentials as well.

Content management and multiple languages

Who will update the site, and how often? If news, blog posts or product details change regularly, an easy-to-use content management system is worth having. For sites that rarely change, a leaner set-up may be all you need.

If you serve international customers, plan for multiple languages from day one. Separate URLs per language, correct hreflang tags and translations written by people rather than machines all make a difference to both visitors and search visibility.

Speed, performance and SEO basics

Google’s Core Web Vitals look at how quickly a page loads, how fast it responds to input and how visually stable it is while loading. A sluggish site frustrates visitors and does your search visibility no favours either.

• ✓Are images compressed and served in modern formats?
• ✓Has performance been tested on mobile devices?
• ✓Can you edit the title and description of every page?
• ✓Will a sitemap and robots.txt be set up?
• ✓Is there a redirect plan for URLs on the old site?

Data protection, cookie consent and analytics

If your site collects personal data through forms or uses analytics, you’ll need a privacy notice and a proper cookie consent mechanism under KVKK, Turkey’s data protection law, and possibly under GDPR if you serve European visitors. Ask your legal adviser to review the wording; implementing it correctly is the web team’s job.

For analytics, agree early on which tools will be used, which goals will be tracked, such as form submissions or phone clicks, and who will have access to the reports. It saves losing data later.

Hosting, backups and maintenance

Once a site goes live it keeps running on infrastructure and needs ongoing attention. If these points aren’t settled at the proposal stage, nobody quite knows who’s responsible when something goes wrong.

• ✓Where will the site be hosted, and how is the SSL certificate renewed?
• ✓How often are backups taken, and where are they stored?
• ✓Who applies security updates?
• ✓What does the maintenance agreement cover, and what are the response times?

In short, and how fountr can help

A good corporate website is more than an attractive design: it’s a project with clear ownership, solid performance, sensible security and a plan for upkeep. At fountr we build websites for clients across Turkey and abroad, and the domain and code always stay with the client. To talk about your project, call us on +90 535 100 71 41.