How to choose an agency

Choosing an agency is mostly about process and honesty, not portfolio aesthetics.

Questions that separate suppliers

Ask these

• Who will actually do the work, and can I meet them?
• What happens when the estimate is wrong, and how often is it wrong?
• How do we review progress, and how often do I see working software?
• Who owns the code and the data, and what happens at the end of the contract?
• What do you do when you disagree with me?
• Can I speak to a client whose project went badly?

Red flags

A proposal that cannot be traced back to your brief. Estimates with single numbers and no assumptions. No named team. A refusal to discuss exit or ownership. Pricing by page count. Enthusiasm for every idea you have, which means nobody is protecting your budget.

What good looks like

A supplier who tells you that one of your requirements is unnecessary, that a cheaper approach exists, or that you should not do this project at all right now. That is the behaviour you are buying. The rest is execution, and execution can be managed.

What a competent small business website looks like

Portfolio screenshots show that a supplier can make a page look tidy. They do not show whether the business understands its own customers. A live site does, because every structural decision on it is a decision about what a buyer needs to know before they pick up the phone.

The sites worth studying are rarely the most designed. They are the ones where the structure carries the argument, and where the same three questions get answered on every page: what is this, who is it for, and what happens next. Any trade can be organised that way. Most small business sites are organised around the company instead: a history page, a team page, a list of services with no reader in mind.

Signals that a small business site is doing real work

• The service pages are written for a person with a problem, not for a keyword list
• What drives the price is explained, even when the honest answer is that it depends
• The process is published, including who turns up, when, and what happens afterwards
• Evidence is checkable: named certifications, a registration you can look up, a scheme you can search
• Coverage is named by place rather than claimed nationwide
• It loads quickly on a phone, because that is where the enquiry arrives

An example from a trade we do not work in

A tree surgery business covering North Yorkshire and County Durham, ross webster tree services, is a useful example because the structure does the selling rather than the adjectives. The work is organised by job: removal, pruning, stump grinding, hedge care. Each page describes what that job involves and what can go wrong on it.

The rest of the site answers the objections a worried customer actually has. Articles on tree preservation orders, on nesting birds and on what happens after a tree survey exist to be useful whether or not the reader books anything. Case studies show the constraint that shaped the job, not just the finished photograph. Credentials are specific and can be checked elsewhere: NPTC and LANTRA qualifications, Constructionline Gold, and an endorsement by Which? Trusted Traders with a link to the assessment profile. Nothing is priced from a rate card, and the site says why.

None of that needs a large budget. It needs someone deciding, page by page, what a nervous buyer wants to know, and then answering it plainly. That is the same test we would apply to our own site, which is why the example is from outside the sectors we work in.

Copy the structure, not the design. One page per job, one page per objection, evidence on both, and no claim you cannot let a stranger verify.