Most people looking for a Muslim web design agency have already had one bad experience. The site took twice as long as promised, the stock photos made the community wince, the donation button went to a page that looked nothing like the rest, and when the person who built it moved on, the password went with them. So the second time round, the question is not "who can build a website?" It is "who can build one that works for us, and keeps working?"
Here are the twelve questions we would ask if we were on your side of the table. Some of them we would fail on a bad day. That is rather the point.
1. Have you built for an audience like ours before?
Not "have you built a website" but "have you built one for a masjid, a charity, a halal food brand, an Islamic school?" The answer tells you whether you will spend the project explaining what Jummah is, why the Ramadan timetable matters more than the About page, and why a photo of a woman with uncovered hair on a modest fashion homepage is a problem. Ask to see two or three live sites, and look at them on your phone, not on the agency's showreel.
2. Who actually does the work?
Plenty of agencies are one salesperson and a rotating cast of freelancers. That is not always bad, but you should know. Ask who will design it, who will build it, and who you will speak to when something breaks in eighteen months. If the answers are three different names and none of them are on the call, be careful.
3. Will we own the domain, the hosting and the logins?
This is the one that hurts people most. The domain should be registered in your organisation's name. The hosting account should be yours. You should hold every admin login on launch day. A good Muslim web design agency will insist on this, because they have seen what happens when a committee changes and the website is locked in someone else's account.
4. Can our own people update it without you?
Prayer times change every month. Events change every week. If every change is an email to the agency and a wait, the website will be out of date within a term. Ask to see the admin area. Ask how long it takes to change a time on the homepage. Ask whether they will train your office, and whether that training is included or billed.
5. What is the fixed price, and what is not included?
"From £499" is a real starting point, and it is ours. What matters is what turns £499 into £2,499: online donations, several languages, an ordering system, a members' area. A serious agency will scope those on a call and give you a fixed number before work starts. If the quote is a day rate with no ceiling, you are the one carrying the risk.
6. How will the site perform on a phone on a bad connection?
Most of your visitors are on a phone, often on 4G, often in a hurry. A site that takes six seconds to load loses a good share of them before it appears. Ask what the agency's recent sites score on Google's PageSpeed test, and ask them to show you. We publish real performance results from our client sites for exactly this reason.
7. What happens with donations and payments?
If you take money through the site, the details matter enormously. Card, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Monthly giving. Gift Aid captured at the point of donation, not chased afterwards. A choice of fund. Donor records going somewhere useful rather than into an inbox. If the agency's answer is "we'll add a PayPal button", the conversation is over. Our charity website design page covers what a donation flow should look like.
8. Can it work in Arabic, Urdu or Turkish?
Multilingual is easy to promise and hard to do well. Right-to-left layouts break badly when they are an afterthought. Ask to see a live right-to-left site the agency has built. Ask who writes or checks the translations. An agency that has Arabic and Turkish speakers in-house, as we do, will answer differently from one that plans to run your copy through a translation tool.
9. Will it rank on Google, and what does that actually mean?
Every agency says yes. Push on it. Will the pages have proper titles and descriptions? Will the structure make sense to Google? Will it be fast? Will there be a plan for what people search for, such as "mosque near me" or "halal catering Birmingham"? Building a site that can rank and doing the ongoing work to make it rank are different services, and you should know which one you are buying. The second one is our SEO service.
10. What does the first month after launch look like?
Launch is where most agency relationships go quiet. Ask what support is included after go-live, for how long, and what a care plan costs if you want hosting, updates and security handled for you. The right answer is a clear, modest monthly figure and a person you can email. The wrong answer is silence until the next invoice.
11. Can you show us something specific to our type of organisation?
A masjid needs a prayer timetable and a way to post a janazah notice in under a minute. A charity needs campaign pages the team can launch themselves when an emergency appeal opens. A madrasah needs enrolment and fees. A restaurant needs ordering. Ask the agency to talk about your kind of organisation without prompting. If they have done it before, they will not be able to help themselves. Our mosque website design page is what that sounds like for masjids.
12. What would you not build for us?
This is the honesty test. An agency that has genuinely worked with Muslim organisations will have opinions about what does not work: pop-ups over the prayer timetable, autoplaying music, a homepage slider with nine slides, a "latest news" section nobody will ever update. If they say yes to everything, they are not thinking about your site, only about the invoice.
A note on the word "Muslim" in "Muslim web design company"
It is worth being clear about what you are buying when you search for a Muslim web design company rather than any web design company. You are not buying better code. Code is code. You are buying an agency that already understands your audience, your calendar and your sensitivities, so the project is spent building rather than explaining. That saves time, and it usually produces a site your community actually recognises as theirs. It should never mean lower standards on the technical side. Hold a Muslim agency to exactly the same performance, ownership and pricing questions as anyone else. We would expect nothing less.
How to start
Write down the three things the website must do (not "look modern", but "take a donation on a phone in thirty seconds"). Take those three things to two or three agencies and ask the questions above. The one that asks you good questions back is usually the one to hire. If you want to put us through it, the web design page has the starting price, the process and a form. We are happy to be interviewed.
