I get a friendly recorded call from “Bob Hansen website builder from Chicago” (or name the city) every couple of months. It’s unrequested spam and I’ve never called him back. If you get a call that sounds like this, you can delete it. This is not a a trustworthy website designer:

How do you know if your website designer is trustworthy?

Calls like this lead me to wonder how a legitimate customer would determine who is a trustworthy website designer and how to tell if a website designer is a scam. I think one way to tell if you’re working with a real website designer is to be the one contacting them first.

There are many places you can check for trustworthy website designers. One useful resource for finding freelance website designers is UpWork. While there area many scams on UpWork, you’ll also find many trustworthy website designers that have 100% Job Success, like us!

Trustworthy Website Designers don’t usually call you first.

A real designer is going to be busy serving real clients so he’s probably not robo-calling customers repetitively across the country.

Bob Hansen has a reputation:

A quick search will return many more.

Each time it’s clear that these are recorded robo-calls from a fake company. I’m not sure if they are selling business for a legitimate company or just phishing to get your credit card information, but be sure to stay away from them.

More ways to tell if your website designer is trustworthy?

A trustworthy website designer should have public reviews. Lots of them. And they should sound like they were written by real people. Real people give details. Real people speak grammatically correct — like real humans speak. Not like another language was translated in Google Translate.

Make sure you look into someone’s Google Business profile, LinkedIn profile, and social media presence, like Facebook, X (a.k.a Twitter), Instagram, and otherwise.

Most scam companies aren’t going to go to the effort of creating all these social profiles. And you won’t see robust reviews on them either.

Ask to see their portfolio

I’ve been designing websites since 2009 and we have worked with hundreds of clients. One thing that I’ve never been asked is “Where did you go to college” or “What did you study”. One thing I’ve been asked hundreds of times is “Can I see your work?” or “Do you have a portfolio I can look at?”

A trustworthy website designer will have a beautiful portfolio you can look at with many references of their excellent work, spanning multiple business types and artistic styles. Take a look at our website design portfolio for reference.

Ask us to help you determine if a website designer is trustworthy

If you’re not sure whether the person you’re speaking to is legitimate, feel free to ask us and we’ll look them over for you. We don’t need your business but we do want to know that you’re being taken care of.

Send us a message if we can help you. Thanks!

Stay aware. More website designer scams will come.

Website Designer Scams aren’t going away so stay on your toes. I’ve heard this Bob Hansen website builder scam dozens of times (and I’m a trustworthy website designer). So I can only imagine how many times unsuspecting clients pick up the phone for these scams. They’ll keep changing. Please reach out to us if you’re ever unsure of who to trust. We have a long list of reviews and satisfied clients to back us up.