Before you choose a web design agency for your website design project, you need to know the features of attributes of a good agency partner.
Without that knowledge, you can fall into the hands of amateur agency that won’t offer value for your time and money.
To prevent that from happening, it’s vital to know and understand these important criteria. They’ll help you build your business to new heights of success. And without them, you risk losing a lot of time and money in a mess of complicated contracts, red tape, and failed deadlines.
With this simple list of 5 criteria, you can ensure your company will find a successful web design partner.
- State your budget
You need to state your budget for web design before considering choosing a web design agency.
Besides, you should set the flexibility of your budget to make sure you can accommodate upsells.
Obviously, you’ll always be willing to pay less than your budget to get what you need, but it’s possible an agency will recommend that you buy other web design options to achieve more success.
- Get their pricing
After stating your own budget, you also need to work on the agency’s pricing. Invest your time on research for agencies that offer different packages or non-packaged services. Finding 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 homework, you could wind up spending way more than you want for services that you don’t need.
- Ask about fees and charges
Even after asking an agency about their pricing, you should also ask about their fees and charges.
Sometimes, an agency has a list of fees and charges that they issue, and they don’t always disclose them to you.
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 spending more with a website that you don’t like.
Ask yourself these questions: Do they charge for making unscheduled updates to the site? Do they bill you for extra for hours that they spend working for your company every month? Can you wind up spending more for an unscheduled checkup about your site?
- Look at their past clients
Every reputable web design agency do have past clients. Your expectations from a web design agency depends on their past clients are saying.
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 say positive things about the web design 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 elsewhere.
- Get their client retention rate
Along with looking at an agency’s previous clients, you can also ask them about how they retain their clients.
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. Similarly, retention rates of about 70% — especially those 90% or above — show exceptional client satisfaction.
The agencies that have the best client retention will typically be your best bets for partnerships.
If web design agency doesn’t have a decent client retention rate, then they’re missing one of those crucial elements, and that means they won’t give you the results that you want.
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.
