19 criteria worth checking, apart from price, when choosing an agency to implement a website project

Let’s assume that we are planning to rebrand our company or launch a new corporate website. We write a brief, search the Internet for several potential agencies, send out requests for proposals and wait for a response. Although we do not have a precise budget for this project, we know roughly how much we can afford to spend. Finally, after receiving several offers, we can refine our assumptions and then select the most promising ones. Based on the proposed prices and assumptions, we decide on the ideal contractor, who has sufficient experience, demonstrates an understanding of our needs, properly defines the challenges and the method of implementation, and proposes amounts that do not differ from the rest. Finally, we receive the offers, and after a preliminary reading, we can already see the “problems” that are emerging. The gap between the suggested solutions and the costs of implementing individual proposals is as vast as the Mongolian steppes.

After 16 years in the industry, I fully understand this problem. I experienced first-hand how difficult it is for clients to choose an agency and compare offers fairly during my 12 years of running an agency, and also earlier, during my 4 years of running a brand “on the client side”, long before we founded ADream in 2011. Working with many agencies on the market at the time, I often faced the same challenge.

Awareness of needs or realisation of ignorance.

Why is it difficult to choose the right contractor?

Comparing agency offers is possible if we have:

• a factual diagnosis of the problem, awareness of our own nuanced needs and the challenges facing the brand, very detailed documentation
• knowledge about possible and optimal ways to meet them and, importantly, a basic understanding of the differences between them;
• or — conscious incompetence in the above areas. When we know what we don’t know, then we understand that our brand and team need adequate support in the form of strategic consulting. And that’s OK too.

Otherwise, we are groping in the dark and ultimately implementing a bad project and wasting time, money, litres of coffee, energy and the enthusiasm of our employees…

Most of our clients are convinced that they have a precise brief or documentation on the basis of which we should prepare a quote. Looking through the eyes of the project team, in 99% of cases this is not the case.

Choosing a contractor based on an imprecise brief and low awareness of the problem can be compared to visiting a car dealership where, when asked about our expectations, we reply that we are interested in a black car with four wheels, automatic transmission and a minimum speed of 150 km/h. Given the number of potential purchase options, such general criteria sound absurd in the context of choosing a car, but in the marketing and IT services industry for small and medium-sized enterprises, they are not unusual.

Most often, when we are unable to define guidelines that are adequate for the needs of our project, we overlook important selection criteria and are guided by what is irrelevant or insufficient: we trust the agency’s facade image, the salesperson’s confidence, we are guided by subjective aesthetic impressions of the agency’s portfolio, we are guided by price, despite the lack of sufficient knowledge as to whether the proposed budget will fully meet our project needs. In short, this is a perfect recipe for how to buy something from a good salesperson, rather than how to create a good project that is at the heart of our company’s marketing.

Learn from your mistakes, but if possible, learn from someone else’s.

We thought long and hard about how to build an objective and reliable list of criteria, one that is equally free of glorification of our own agency and supported by empirical evidence from our rich professional experience/project background. After all, valuable know-how comes from lessons learned from mistakes measured in years. Today, we would like to share this knowledge, because we know of no better way to improve industry standards, raise market awareness and support good decision-making than by sharing our knowledge and experience. Market education is a long-distance, synergistic team game in which, in the end, everyone who wants to grow wins.

Below is a list of 19 key criteria to consider when choosing the optimal partner for cooperation, i.e. the best in terms of current needs and the current stage of the company’s development. This wording is deliberate, as we avoid unambiguous and golden rules such as “the best for everyone, in all conditions and at all times” – everything depends on the size of our organisation, the complexity of our needs, aspirations and budget.

Who do you want to work with, and who do you work with? An agency, a freelancer, or perhaps a freelancer who claims to be an agency?

First of all, in our industry, there is an old and well-established symmetrical rule: small with small, large with large. When do we advise against working with the smallest player in the ranking, i.e. a 2-3-person team calling itself a boutique agency/design studio or a freelancer? Always when we are talking about a highly complex and important marketing or IT project and we lack an experienced team and ready-made procedures and accepted methodologies for conducting this type of activity. It does not matter whether we are talking about building a web shop or a smaller, but significant from the perspective of current marketing, company website with 6 static views and 1 form. Our agency’s experience shows a high percentage of failures in the relationships between micro-agencies and freelancers with our existing clients’ companies. Lack of work fluidity, sudden and unannounced lack of contact, project delays, etc. This does not mean that there are no good small project teams or freelancers, but our observations show that they most often operate as subcontractors for larger agencies or perform individual small project tasks. Based on our clients’ experiences, we can see that the same freelancer would do a good job for us as an agency, but not necessarily for a less experienced client . Why? Because we have established proven rules of operation and know how to set up such cooperation, we work on proven project management systems, we assign tasks according to effective work methodologies, we verify the effectiveness of resources and development team members, we enforce deadlines more effectively, and finally, we have complete data and grounds for settling the project with maximum accuracy — completely fair for both parties. When there is an unexpected absence of one of the employees in the team, we have a pool of at least several people in reserve to replace them. Working with a freelancer will definitely be much cheaper, and therefore tempting, but a project, even one as common as a company website, is not a task for 1, 2, or even 3 people, but for a team of at least 6-7 people. In this article, we focus on best practices, so I am referring to the full process for a serious brand, managed by an experienced project manager who ensures that all stages are completed reliably: from UX design, through copy, UI design, front-end and back-end development, to testing and SEO optimisation. By opting for an inexpensive team of 1-2 people, which is the most common on the market (which also explains the wide disparities in pricing), we are condemning ourselves to the risk of the project not being completed or, in the best case scenario, a significant delay in implementation, the curse of lack of communication, unanswered phone calls, lack of responsiveness in the event of a failure and, as is often the case with such projects, incurring the costs of repair or construction of a new website by another team in the future. However, when the project does come to fruition and is completed without any major surprises, another problem arises — a smaller team means fewer resources to execute it according to best practices. A team consisting of 1-2 people is usually a salesperson + webmaster, who simply cannot provide us with parallel support in the 4-5 specialisations that make up a good website. Analysing the solution’s audience, designing a well-thought-out UX path and structure, creating a unique UI design with interesting icon typography, fonts and styling on the website, and implementing graphics and back-end development is simply too much work for a team of 2-3 people. Instead of a properly executed process by an experienced team, we will get a website made on a ready-made, repeatable template and often unstable technological infrastructure. We have described in more detail here why we advise against building serious websites on templates and what the risks are.

Another aspect worth noting is the image of freelancers who present themselves as agencies. Many of the clients we have worked with were convinced that they had found an agency, when in fact the business was run by one person who claimed to be an agency on their website. However, the fact that they know two graphic designers and act as a project manager and programmer does not make them an agency… An agency is much, much more, as I will mention in the following points. If you run a small business, it is worth considering working with a recommended freelancer, but this relationship should be based on complete openness, awareness and honesty about mutual needs. It is crucial to have a common understanding of the brand’s needs, how to achieve the goal, the contractor’s competences, business conditions, deadlines and schedule. The latter should not only assume the actual structure of overlapping processes (as in a Gantt chart), but should also include the working time of your team as the client, a time margin for substantive consultations, comments and deadlines for reported corrections and approvals. Project implementation is a team effort, which clients often forget, especially when working with a freelancer who, on their own, cannot act as an external marketing department with materials, a strategic concept, good copy, graphics and the ability to implement and finalise the production of the selected tool. As , we do not pretend to be a large company that is about to commission a lot of other projects, and freelancers do not pretend to be agencies with years of experience, even if it was just a job for their brother-in-law three years ago on a single project. Any cooperation is possible as long as it is honestly agreed and defined by both parties, even if we have transparently calculated certain disadvantages.

The company’s continuous operation?

I write “continuous” for a reason, because the fact that someone ran a company for two years, closed it ten years ago, and has now reopened it does not mean that the company has been operating and developing its know-how for 12 years.

Why is this important?

Each stage of a company’s development has its own problems, which also affects customer satisfaction. My assumption is that in 90% of cases, I do not work with sole traders without full-time employees or companies that are less than three years old. The exception here may be new companies within a larger holding structure due to their strong know-how base.

In the case of sole traders, the main reason is that such people may also take holidays, fall ill, have various personal situations, accumulate work after sick leave and holidays, and the priority is not me but: the deadline, contractual penalties that someone has signed, the scale of the client and which project can be closed faster or started in order to issue an invoice as soon as possible. The situation is similar with freelancers. We do not work this way because it brings such enormous risks to the scale of our business that we cannot afford to bear them and we will not burden the client with them either. This is particularly unacceptable in the case of accounting or legal services. The consequences of mistakes are much greater than the potential benefits of savings. The exceptions are very high-class specialists, most often consultants with very specific know-how, but if it is possible to do something with a larger company, I will choose the larger one. The other side of the same coin is companies that are too large, where I am a cog in a big machine, and I do not want a big machine of interns to take care of our company. This is not the case everywhere, but I have encountered it, so I am warning you. You can also find agencies that operate in this way, whose growth is too rapid and is compensated for by lowering the bar for recruitment, or, for example, it is simply the result of the cost-cutting policy of a new financial director who wants to prove himself in the short term.

The second issue is the first three years of a company. This is a period of intense learning and mistakes. We are not very keen on paying someone to learn on our agency, let alone on our clients. If a company has been in business for less than three years, it can be assumed that it is still in the process of maximising its know-how and catching falling glasses due to a lack of established procedures and a quality system. Many companies never develop their standards despite their long presence on the market, but the scale of mistakes made over time develops them anyway. I believe that companies are run by clear-thinking people who do not want to make the same mistakes twice, learn from them and improve their organisations, but this requires time and business maturity. Therefore, when considering companies that have been on the market for less than 3 years, we add a significant risk factor to our project.

We have been on the market for almost 12 years, and I remember very well what kind of company we were in the 1-3, 4-7, 8-10 and now periods. Each of these stages brought something new and involved different areas of work on the company. Realistically, I can say that the period in which we have been consciously working on the company is the last 3 years, even though we have been creating procedures to improve the company from the very beginning. This approach is of great importance. Personally, I believe that 5.6+ is already quite safe.

Somehow, this is very far from quality.

We will not know immediately whether a company has an avalanche of complaints or not. The most problematic situations are not described in online reviews. However, there is a way to verify this. It is worth understanding how a company can ensure quality. Quality is not a matter of chance; quality is the result of the repeatability of well-performed activities, and for these to be performed, they must be proceduralised. Only thanks to well-developed organisational procedures, e.g. the start or project delivery procedure, will we not be doomed to remind them a month after the project delivery to add a favicon in the browser, access data, secure the website against hacking or add the code responsible for statistics. How to check if a company has procedures? Ask if they have procedures? And what will a good salesperson say? They will say that yes, they do, and they probably won’t lie because they will think of the procedure for transferring the website to the server that a programmer once wrote for someone else, but that’s not what we care about. We can ask directly, “How do you ensure the quality of your products?” “How do you ensure that customers do not return with complaints?” I think the answer will clearly show whether the company has it or whether the company representative is trying to “somehow” get out of the question.

In our case, every time something came back to us or we felt that something could work better, we added it to the procedures. There was a point when the project delivery procedure had 34 points and we were doing things that the customer did not even know we were doing. We didn’t want to share this, but we knew it had to be done and we couldn’t count on the client not noticing, because if we sign off on it, it has to be done the way we know it should be done. In the case of a client who sold investment products, our procedures allowed for sales worth several million in a situation where the client thought they had lost over 40 potential transactions for their apartments and could forget about finalising them. We anticipate so that we don’t have to react in panic.

Number of completed projects in the portfolio and case studies?

The policy of creating a portfolio in agencies varies. Some assume that we do projects and put the best ones in the portfolio to show what we can do. That’s fine, but what guarantee is there that our project is one of those for the portfolio and not just for the invoice? The second thing that also says a lot about a company is whether it has a portfolio and has had time to invest in it.

There was a period in our company’s history, a long time ago, when we were like the shoemaker without shoes. Either there was no time, or our creative director Wojciech Kmiecik decided that the project was not suitable for the portfolio.

We then made a rather bold financial decision. First of all, we introduced a policy that every project goes into the portfolio. Each one is to represent us, be a carrier of our agency’s quality, build our position on the market and attract further enquiries from companies. To be honest, this was not the case in the past, when we were able to compromise on quality in order to reach an agreement with the client. That was a mistake. The client was satisfied and even wanted to recommend us, but when they wanted to recommend us to someone who expected high-quality work, that person looked at the project and said, no, not them, I’m looking for someone who will do something at a higher level.

That is why, among other things, we decided that every project goes into the portfolio or we don’t do it. If we can’t manage to add them all, we have to think about which ones to add and not which ones are suitable for adding.

Building a portfolio is also one of the soft indicators of our agency’s development, which we summarise annually. For us, it is also a measure of the company’s value. It is also motivating for specialists working on projects because people want to do very good things, no one wants to work on projects that are just for show to cover costs. If a company has such a policy, one may wonder whether the people who work there are good, because in today’s labour market, our most important customers are our employees, and they want to work only on projects that make sense and give them development opportunities.

If a company does not have a portfolio, it is also worth considering whether, if no one in the company is able to organise their time to build the company’s image, my project will be in good hands and delivered on time.

How big is the team?

Here, the main risk is that it is too small, because if the company consists of a very small team, the question is whether the project will continue if someone falls ill. If one of the people working on the projects is the owner, who has a ton of other responsibilities, most often including sales, there is also a chance that our project will suffer either in terms of quality or timeliness. In our case, 20 specialists work on websites, including graphic designers, back-end and front-end developers, and UX specialists. Over 30 people work in the ADream group.

Who do I contact when running a project and who commissions corrections to the project?

In many agencies, the client contacts the graphic designer and programmer. We do not understand this approach, because our experience shows that both web designers and developers do not like/are unable to communicate effectively with clients. The exceptions are those responsible for project architecture and documentation. In our case, the role of the project manager is to communicate with the client, and this is active cooperation, not a so-called forward manager, i.e. someone who does not even read but just forwards to the graphic designer or programmer. When a project is prepared, the project manager first sends corrections, and only after they have been approved by the project manager and creative director can they be sent to the client. However, it is often the other way around, and it is the client who has to request corrections and describe their suggestions because “maybe they will approve it”. We turn to an agency because it is not our job to know everything, but to get a good project and have one person to contact, rather than managing a team of people ourselves. If we make the wrong choice, we are guaranteed to have dozens of hours of extra work on our side as the client.

How can I contact you?

I know it seems strange, but there are companies where the only form of contact is email. This is partly so that all arrangements and communication can be used as potential evidence and because it is easier for specialists to write than to talk to the client. We respond to every message within one working day and prefer to talk to exchange views rather than positions. If we are unable to be contacted due to holiday or illness, we provide the contact details of a substitute person who is familiar with the project and has all the information about it in the project management system, even if a random situation has occurred and no one has had time to delegate the project.

How is the project managed?

Many companies run projects via email, but we know that this is not effective and cannot be done, especially for large projects. We remember the times 10 years ago when emails had 20 threads that got lost in further processing attempts, whether it was our fault or the client’s. Not to mention what happened when it got to the graphic designer or programmer. It is impossible to work effectively and methodically this way. We run our projects in a project management system, which allows us to guarantee a systematic approach to achieving results. It is possible to set up an account for the client, provide training and transfer all communication to the system, where all tasks are threaded and there is no possibility, as in the case of email, that something will be left unanswered or overlooked, and the project has a progress report created on an ongoing basis. It is worth establishing this because training in the system and implementation is often an added value in itself to the cooperation and generates a lot of time savings for the client. However, it is always worth discussing, threading and enforcing arrangements systematically.

How is the project priced?

At our agency, we clearly show how many hours we plan to spend on the project and what our rates are.

We develop a number of different views and functionalities. It is always worth asking how many hours are planned for the project. If someone has priced something at 2,000 and has a rate of £100 net, it is worth asking yourself why one company has planned 200 hours for the project, another 100 hours and another only 20. We have already taken over projects where our clients, encouraged by an occasional offer, bought something that ultimately differed greatly from their expectations. If a company does not specify what it does, but only laconically enters the number of hours or the amount, there is usually a risk that it will either overestimate or underestimate. What I am about to write will probably come as a big surprise, but who suffers the greatest losses when an agency misprices a project?

Unfortunately, Client, it seems strange, but that’s how it is. It is extremely important for the project whether the agency earns money on the project, defends its profitability or loses money, because from a good project that is created with the customer in mind, we move on to a stage where we have to somehow tie it all together, and in the end, the customer is no longer important at all, but we have to deliver something that more or less fits the specifications because the contractor is drowning financially on the project. We took over such projects from various agencies, and most often they were good agencies that did not agree well on the scope or showed a complete lack of assertiveness, which caused them to lose money on the project and want to give it up. Taking over such a project from other agencies with so-called technological debt always cost the client more. That is why the approach of “if the agency made a mistake and we pay less, the better for us” will 100% backfire in the future. When I commission work to anyone, I always think about whether that person will make a profit and whether the cost estimate is reasonable, because after building a house, I know that contractors who make mistakes and underestimate costs have no motivation to work. When finishing my own house, I often checked how the cost estimates were calculated and whether the contractor had calculated them correctly, because I knew that if they made a mistake, it would ultimately affect the deadline or quality. Both of these factors had an impact on other teams, etc.  I would not wish anyone to go to court in Poland and sue an agency. Even an agency that is just starting out and wants to prove itself by initially accepting a job for a lower amount loses its enthusiasm after a few weeks of work and is left with the bitterness of a lot of work for little money. If we do not pay adequately, we will most often pay with stress and time.

What is the warranty period and what does it cover?

The warranty depends on whether we plan to create a website using dedicated software or open source software, such as WordPress. When a project is based on our dedicated solution, we know that as long as there are no problems with the server, it will work for years.

The situation is different when the project involves the use of, for example, the WordPress system. 40% of websites on the internet today are based on this CMS, but despite its many advantages, this solution also has its disadvantages. It is constantly being developed, also due to the fact that it is targeted by all hackers. The software is secure as long as it is up to date.

In our case, we provide a 12-month warranty for all our websites. It covers all hidden defects in the system and the restoration of the website in the event of a failure from a backup made on the day the project was delivered. However, the warranty does not cover ongoing updates of all components and possible servicing and ongoing updates of the engine.

What does servicing and updating look like after the project is delivered?

We provide this service separately as part of forsecure.pl maintenance. We never leave our clients without the possibility of constant updates and maintenance based on our 8 years of know-how, while ensuring a minimum monthly cost for such a service. In addition to the necessary updates, we remove potential viruses, monitor websites and protect them against hacking. According to our technology partners, we are the first agency in Poland to take WordPress security seriously, designing appropriate quality assurance procedures and creating our own systems to support this work.

Many companies create websites on the WordPress system, but do not inform their clients that the website needs to be updated regularly, sometimes several times a month. We have found a golden mean that allows us to create websites based on the WordPress system that are not so vulnerable to attacks, but this is due to the choice of technology, which I will mention in the following points.

Websites are like cars, they have to undergo servicing and technical inspections, except that in IT this has to be done frequently, every week rather than every year.

How is additional work during a project billed, and what constitutes additional work?

Sometimes the scope of work does not allow for a precise estimate. A natural part of cooperation is that when we start working with clients, we begin to transfer know-how to the client’s company, which results in better ideas than originally intended. At , modifications begin during the project. The entire work is then measured by monitoring the time spent on tasks. The system allows you to measure employee time down to the second and generate detailed reports for clients on additional work with a real-time preview of that work. It is very important to ask how the company bills for such work, especially when we are just creating a solution together and it is not yet defined and possible to cost, or we do not want to stop the project every time to contract work for 30 minutes. At our company, every specialist working on a task immediately activates the start/stop button on the task. If the company does not already have such a solution in place, it will not implement it well for the project. It is crucial to determine how the project is implemented, whether in a Fixed Price or Time and Material model.

When signing a contract, can I withdraw from it if I am dissatisfied with how the project is being implemented?

To ensure security and flexibility for our clients, remuneration for the project is settled in stages. If the client wants to terminate the cooperation, for example after the competition analysis or graphic design stage, we provide them with the developed materials and the project costs are settled in proportion to the work done. If there is no chemistry, there is no point in forcing the collaboration. In almost 12 years, we have had this situation twice, so we are not afraid of it and do not feel the need to force clients to stay with us. It is worth asking the agency about this because we know of situations where a salesperson promised the moon and then it was impossible to withdraw from the contract, or the project presented to the client was of a completely different quality than those seen in the portfolio.

References and recommendations

Over 75% of our clients come from recommendations. For 5 years, we have been active in the BNI organisation, which connects entrepreneurs from around the world who support each other on the condition of guaranteeing high-quality services. Additionally, our recommendations can be checked at https://adream.pl/referencje

It is essential to check the references and the scale of the projects they relate to. The number of references is a reliable indicator. If we have references from our industry, so much the better, although if we operate in a niche market, it will be difficult to find such a contractor.

Stages tailored to the project

For larger projects aimed at launching a new product or service on the market, the work begins long before a single line of code is written. Competitor analysis, conversion path and prototyping are processes that will allow you to predict the success of your project as accurately as possible. The aspect of design processes is very important because many companies operate on the basis of ready-made themes purchased for £50, which makes website designs cheaper but not tailored to the needs of the client or the target group, and therefore they do not achieve business objectives. Most often, such projects are done by one person, unlike professional design paths, where the team consists of about 6 people. It is essential to ask about the process of creating websites because often, when creating a cheap website using shortened processes, we will pay for it at the marketing campaign stage by paying media budgets while continuously lacking marketing results.

Can the company boast about the effectiveness of its websites?

Many companies simply create websites without necessarily promoting them afterwards. It is worth asking about the model in which the company operates. Does it simply create websites or is it involved in the development of the client’s business? For us, a website is the heart of a company’s marketing, which is taken care of by our second agency, When.pl, which deals with promotion. This is an additional motivator for creating effective websites. If we created something that was poor, our second company would not undertake promotion or there would be no results. This would not reflect well on our products and would cause disputes between our teams, who work in the same office and want to achieve good results in their campaigns.

Our portfolio includes many case studies describing projects from inception to final marketing results.

Do you create websites using plugins?

There are literally a few solutions that we use, but our company policy is to create dedicated solutions even in WordPress for clients, rather than using ready-made components that may have security vulnerabilities or where there is a risk that the developer will stop updating the solution. This gives our products more opportunities for development and customisation. The worst possible solution used by various other agencies is to implement a plugin that is similar in functionality and customise it in the code. If, after a few months, it turns out that the basic plugin has a security vulnerability, it will not be possible to update it due to the changes made by the agency. Our products are also written in a dedicated manner and are not created from templates that are poorly optimised and often have security vulnerabilities after a short time.

Technology selection, or how will the website be created?

It is not the case that a specific technology is best for everyone. We often recommend different approaches depending on the scale of the project, but today the standard is becoming the so-called headless approach, thanks to which we can have a website that works faster than the competition and has a very high security standard.
In short, what customers see is on one fast server and our administration panel is on another, which makes everything work faster because the servers only exchange the necessary data via the so-called API protocol. We use react.js technology, which was created by Facebook and is still used by Facebook and Instagram.
It is worth asking whether the agency creates the website based on headless technology or in the old way as html, css and java script. Creating websites based on old technologies is still carried out by many companies, if only because of the shortage of 600,000 programmers in Europe, but the question is whether we want our website to be built this way, and if so, why.
We have written a separate article on this topic, which you can read here.

I hope this article has cleared up many doubts and will help you avoid many mistakes when choosing a contractor.
If you have any questions, please write to us and arrange a free consultation. You can also fill out the brief by clicking here.

If you would like to receive an Excel file that will allow you to compare offers from different contractors based on these criteria, please contact us and request the file here.