What should I ask for in a contract with a web designer?

[Sam]

Make sure before you pay him/ her you go over the details of EVERYTHING you are looking for in a website. I'm a graphic designer and I spend a lot of my time making websites for company's. One thing I notice a lot is they don't give me specifics and get mad when the final product is something they don't like. Give your designer specifics of what you're looking for, such as drop down menus, parent / child menus, give him a specific for the logo. all the way down to the tiniest detail you can think of. a facebook page isn't something that's really hard to make, you could honestly do that on your own. you could also print your own business cards (there are websites that do it for cheaper). The website takes a lot of time, and they can be extremely frustrating, same goes for logos. He / She will probably go through at least 10 ideas before finding the right one. Depending on what kind of website you are using depends on how much you should really pay this person. If you're using word press then it would be a little more expensive but if you're using something such as Joomla! it shouldn't be that hard at all.
In all honesty, put in the contract that you won't pay until the website is what you agree on. things like that. I always make sure my clients are 110% happy before I accept my pay. Then again not many artists are like me. His / Her price seems pretty steep for the fact that the only real work going into this, is a website and a logo. but like I said, depending on what you're asking for and what they're going to do it's probably reasonable. I've seen people charge over 4,000$ for just a website that had a few drop down menus and nothing else, super simple.

Just make sure you get everything you want out of the deal.