Ciara and Tom are opening a brunch place in El Cabanyal. Their message arrived at eleven at night: "We need an English speaking web designer in Valencia. Everyone we find is either a freelancer profile with no prices or an agency that only answers in Spanish. What should we even ask?" Fair question. Search that exact phrase and Google hands you Malt and Twine profiles, a job board and an expat directory that has not been updated in years. No article. So here is the one we wished existed, written by a studio that would like your business but would rather you ask the right questions first, even if you end up elsewhere.
Why "English speaking" is the smallest part of the problem
Plenty of designers in Valencia speak good English. That is not what goes wrong. What goes wrong is that the site ends up on the designer's hosting, the domain in the designer's name, the quote turns out to be without IVA, the "two weeks" become two months, and the contact form sends to an inbox nobody reads. None of those failures has anything to do with language. They have to do with what you agreed before paying, and most foreigners agree to very little because the Spanish paperwork feels like a wall.
Treat the seven checks below as that wall, lowered.
Check 1: whose name is on the domain, the hosting and the code
Ask it exactly like that. The acceptable answer is "yours, from the first day". Anything else, including "we manage it for you so you don't have to worry", means that when you fall out, you lose the address your customers know. Ask for the registrar login, or at least confirmation that the registrant contact is you. Ask where the code lives and whether you get a copy. At Skyba Tech the domain, the hosting account and the code are registered to the client before we write a line. It is the main reason people leave local agencies for us, and it costs us nothing to do.
Check 2: is the price fixed, and is it with or without IVA
Quotes to businesses in Spain are normally given without IVA, and the tax is added on the invoice. That is normal, not a trick, but it surprises people who read "490" and pay more. Ask for the figure without IVA and the figure you will actually transfer. Then ask whether it is fixed. An hourly rate with no cap is how a landing page becomes a four-figure bill. Our prices are fixed: 290 EUR for a one-page landing with up to five sections, 690 EUR for a longer bilingual landing, from 1,290 EUR for a corporate site, all without IVA, with a deposit of a third to a half and the rest after launch.
Check 3: the deadline in days, and what delays it
"Two to three weeks" means nothing if the clock only starts when you deliver texts and photos. Ask for a number of working days from the moment you hand over materials, and ask what the designer needs from you to start. We say seven days for a landing page, and we can say it because we build on Next.js with our own design system rather than assembling WordPress plugins; there is no theme to fight and nothing to patch afterwards. If a designer quotes a month for one page, ask what happens in week three.
Check 4: what happens after launch, and what it costs
Some studios in the city sell a site for a low price and then a "maintenance" fee every month that you cannot leave without losing the site. Ask whether there is any recurring fee, what it covers, and what happens if you stop paying. Domain and hosting renew yearly and that is a real cost. A monthly fee for "updates" on a one-page site is usually a fee for keeping you.
Check 5: Spanish legal texts, in Spanish
A business site in Spain needs a legal notice identifying the owner, a privacy policy if it collects any data (a contact form counts) and a cookie notice if it sets cookies. These must be in Spanish; an English version is a courtesy, not a replacement. Ask whether they are included and whether the designer knows what goes in them for an autónomo with a NIE versus an SL. If the answer is a blank look, the site will go live without them, and that is your fine, not theirs.
Check 6: WhatsApp, not a twelve-field form
Spanish customers write on WhatsApp. A café in El Cabanyal will get more reservations from a green button that opens a chat with "Hola, quiero reservar para el sábado" already typed than from any form. Ask the designer how they handle contact. If the answer is only "a form that emails you", ask them to add a WhatsApp link with a prepared message per section. It is a five-minute job and it changes the numbers you see in month one.
Check 7: show me one site for a business like mine, here
Not a portfolio of twenty logos. One site, for a restaurant or a clinic or an agency in Valencia, that you can open on your phone right now. Load it on mobile data, not café wifi. Tap the phone number. Find the opening hours. If you cannot do those three things in thirty seconds, do not hire them, whatever language they speak. We will send you our restaurant, dental clinic and real estate sites on request and let you poke at them.
What you can do yourself before hiring anyone
Two things cost nothing and matter more than the site in your first weeks. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile with photos, hours and a Spanish description; when we ask our clients' customers how they found them, the first answer is usually Maps. And set up WhatsApp Business with a catalogue and quick replies, so the number on your door already answers like a business. Both will feed the site later, and both work without one.
When you should not hire us, or anyone
If you have not yet served a paying customer, do not buy a website. We turn that work down, because a page for a business that has not tested its offer gets rebuilt in six months. If your customers are entirely on Instagram and happy there, a good profile and the two tools above will carry you for a while. If you need a full online shop with stock, shipping and returns, we are not the right studio; we will say so and point you elsewhere. And if you want someone to promise first-page rankings, keep walking. Nobody honest can promise that, in any language.
What working with Skyba Tech looks like
You write on WhatsApp. We ask what you sell, to whom, in which neighbourhood, and what you want people to do on the page. You send texts, photos and your NIE or CIF for the legal pages. We quote a fixed price, you pay the deposit, and seven days later a landing page is live on your domain, with the WhatsApp button, the form, the legal texts and the basic SEO in place. You pay the rest, and you own everything.
If you are comparing designers this week, send us the quotes you already have and we will tell you, in English, which questions to ask them. Ten minutes on WhatsApp, fixed price before any work starts.