Finally, you’ve decided you need a new website. If you’re not already working with a web design agency, how do you choose the right firm to develop a website for your business?

You have to know the dealings of a good agency partner before choosing a web design company because, without that knowledge, you risk choosing the wrong agency and that could be a disastrous waste of time and money.

It’s important to know and understand these important basics in order to protect you and your business against that potential mistake. Without their support, you risk losing a lot of time and money in a mess of complicated contracts, red tape, and failed deadlines.

So before choosing a successful web design partner, you need to go through a basic list of 10 criteria mentioned below:

1.Your website budget

Setting a budget for your web design project is the first thing you should do before you start looking at web design agencies.

A budget can be a shoestring to unlimited funding, but you should have an amount on paper before you start pursuing agencies.

In addition to that, you should set the flexibility of your budget to make sure you can accommodate up-selling.

An agency will recommend that you buy other web design options to achieve more success even though you’ll always be willing to pay less than your budget to get what you need. While the agency has a financial incentive to do that, they’re also the experts in their field which means they know what will work for you.

Also, you should have an amount for your budget that you’ll tell your agency.

This number should be lower than your actual budget to give yourself some additional room when you’re chalking out what you want from an agency. When the percentage amount is slightly lower than average lying anywhere around 75% to 90% of your actual budget is when you can easily accommodate their suggestions without breaking the bank.

That will be a win-win situation for both which is a great way to start a successful relationship with an agency.

2.Web design agency’s pricing

After deciding your budget, you also need to research an agency’s pricing.

That can take a lot of time especially for agencies that offer different pricing plans for their services. Analyzing what you can afford and how it can improve your business is a critical portion of the partnership process, and if you don’t do your research, you could end up spending way more than you want for services that you don’t need.

However, most agencies out there don’t publish their pricing. That’s because the best agencies in the industry usually require you to contact them to get information on packages, and sometimes they won’t give you that information until you tell them you want to work out a web design strategy.

If you are someone who wants all of the information upfront, you will have a much smaller pool of potential partners than someone who can go with the flow.

Generally, agencies that publish their pricing are more dedicated to transparency and working within your set budget than agencies that keep it a secret. However, it’s still uncommon to find pricing listed online, even for the best agencies out there.

3. Hidden fees and charges

Even after you’ve asked an agency about pricing, you have one last piece of financial business on your hands.

Sometimes, an agency has a list of fees and charges that they issue, and they don’t always tell you about them.

They might be in the fine print of your contract, or they might not list fees anywhere at all. But if you partner with an agency without asking about surprise fees, you could quickly find yourself over-budget with a website that you don’t like.

With that in mind, it’s essential that you talk to your agency about their policy on fees. Do they charge for making unscheduled updates to the site? Do they bill you for extra hours that they spend working for your company every month? Can you end up spending more for an unscheduled checkup about your site?

All of those questions are good to ask, especially since there’s no “standard” stance on fees for web design agencies. It’s up to you to get the details you need for success, especially if they’re not presented upfront.

Once you have your finances in order, you can move onto the next important step of agency evaluation.

4. Check their website

The site a web design agency builds for its own company is a good indication of its design style, capabilities, and technological expertise. Do you like the site overall? Is the site responsive? Is that website is user-friendly?

If the design of their website doesn’t exactly reflect your own style then that’s not a big problem. A good web design company never copy-paste their own style. They create a new design for your brand guidelines and style aesthetic, not their own. The important thing is that the site looks up to date and is visually pleasing, highly functional, and user-friendly.

5. Check their portfolio

Every web design company will have their own portfolio section on their website. So you can easily see some examples of their previous work. Check some website they have developed. Is they are looking professional and easy to use? Do the sites seem similar in scope?

That will show you what you can expect from an agency, and it’ll also give you a list of clients to contact to find out more.

While it’s important to see examples of an agency’s work, this step also gives you the information you need to contact an agency’s clients directly and ask about their experience.

If they speak highly of the agency, you can rest assured that you’re in good hands. If they say they can’t wait to get out of their contract, then it’s critical that you look somewhere else.

This is the basic idea is to learn from companies who came before you.

Was partnering with this web design agency the best choice they’ve ever made? Or are they struggling to keep up with payments? Anyway, you’ll have got a clear picture of that web design agency, whether or not you should contact that agency.

Along with looking at an agency’s previous clients, you can also ask them about their client retention rate.

A lot of companies will hover around 60% or so, and anything below that indicates that there’s something sketchy going on with the agency itself.

The agencies that have the best client retention will typically be your best bets for partnerships. After all, a website isn’t just something that you throw together — it takes time, strategizing, and execution to make everything come together.

If that web design agency doesn’t have a good client retention rate, then they’re missing some important things, and that means they won’t give you the results that you expect.

But when you find an agency with a high client retention rate — and when they publish it online for everyone to see — you can be sure you’ve found a quality agency.

6. Accountability

Pay attention to how they handle the call—are they accessible and friendly? Do they ask questions about your company and the details of the project, or do they immediately launch into a hard sell? This is a company you will be working with for months, so chemistry is important. answers the phone might not be the one you end up dealing with the most (or at all) once you have signed on as a client, that person still reflects the overall personality of the company, so be sure it feels like a good fit.

When you work with an agency, you don’t want them to say that they’re responsible as a whole for your success. That mentality reflects an undefined, loose, and undisciplined culture that can let you downtime and time again.

Instead, you want to get the name and contact information of a representative who is personally responsible for seeing that your site gets the attention it needs to succeed. You should have one point of contact that can answer your questions, update you regularly on your progress, and discuss alterations to your current strategy whenever required.

Without that contact, the agency can pass blame among its employees and make excuse after excuse for why you’re not achieving your goals.

But when you have a single person who’s accountable for your satisfaction, there’s no doubt about the responsible person whose name is right there on your phone.

7. Other customer support

Even for agencies that give you a dedicated point of contact, that person may not always be available 100% of the time.

After all, they’re human, and sometimes they get sick, take vacations, or have to take care of their personal lives.

So if your point of contact isn’t available, you need a person or a team who can give you the support you need, especially if your representative is gone for an extended amount of time.

Whether that’s the department head, your contact’s coworker, or someone who looks after clients for people out of the office, you need to know so you can continually keep the agency accountable for your progress.

In addition, you also need information on an agency’s customer support policy.

If something goes wrong with your site, you need to be able to contact them to fix the error. Can you call whenever you want? Or do you have to wait for certain hours? Either way, you need to know.

8. Updating the website

Sometimes, a web design agency will set you up with the tools you need to make direct changes to your website with a content management system (or CMS).

However, sometimes they keep everything in-house so they can better keep an eye on your updates.

Regardless of which policy your agency has, it’s important that you know about it so you can understand how you’ll work together.

If you can make changes to your site directly, that’s great! And if you don’t want to deal with the site at all, you can entrust the agency to do it all for you.

Ultimately, this depends on the kind of project manager you like to be. If you’re hands-on, ask for a way to make changes to the site yourself.

And if you have other things to do, ask the agency to take care of it for you. You win either way!

A full-service web design agency should include a basic training session for your team to explain how things work and show how to make changes and updates. Have a list of things you think you’ll need to update fairly frequently (events, forms, page content, etc.) and ask which of these things will be editable in the content management system. For changes that require programming or design help, the company should provide a quote for the amount of time the change will take, and a rate for the work

9. Relocating your site

In some cases, a web design agency may not work with your existing hosting service.

Instead, they may host it themselves or switch services to another company that they’ve contracted as an exclusive provider.

In the event that they’re going to move your site to another host, you need to know.

You don’t want to try and check out your website one day only to find out that it’s hosted somewhere else under a different username and password. When you’re that out of the loop, an agency can do anything they want to your site without your supervision — and that can be a recipe for disaster.

On top of having free reign over your site, moving your hosting service can also affect your website’s loading speed and accessibility. If you operate in Maine and your web design agency relocates your servers to Guam, that’s almost an 8000-mile difference.

While this is an extreme example, it’s critical that you know where an agency will host your website.

If the servers are on the other side of the world from your primary demographic, then your demographic won’t be able to access your website as quickly as your competitors’ websites.

If your website moves, make sure you know where it’s going.

10. Meeting the deadlines

Last, after you’ve gone through all of the previous steps, you need to set concrete, achievable criteria with deadlines.

This kind of scheduling and outlining gives you a way to track the progress of your web design agency.

If your partner is ahead of schedule, then you know you chose a good partner. And if they’re lagging behind, you might want to consider talking to another agency.

Steps like defining whether or not your website will be accessible on mobile platforms, how many visitors you want to support at any time when your site will launch, a regular maintenance schedule, and more.

As a rule of thumb, you’ll be more successful when you’re more specific about what you want to achieve. Setting general goals gives your agency a wiggle room, which gives them the opportunity to miss the mark.

Final Selection

A lot of effort goes into building a website, but just as much effort goes into optimizing it, promoting it, measuring its performance, and making improvements. Unless you have an in-house digital marketing team ready to take over every aspect of digital marketing once your new website is complete, look for a web design firm that also specializes in digital marketing, so you can be sure that the new website is delivering the results you want. Ideally, the selected agency’s team would be available to you should you wish to deepen your engagement with ongoing digital marketing or periodic enhancements or refreshes.

And if you think of other questions you want to ask, always ask them — a good web design agency will never turn away your questions or give you vague answers.

To find the best fit for your needs, and make sure they’ll work with you through all of the questions and concerns you have.

With all of this information at your disposal, you can now make a good choice for a web design partner for your business.