Finding a digital agency – What to look for

Many businesses having decided to engage a digital agency are confused by the complexity of what is possible and the sheer number of web design agencies offering their services. They therefore go for what they understand: price. What they don’t understand is the long term cost of lost business or a tarnished reputation through having a poorly designed and operated web presence.

So what should our aspiring website owner look for when engaging a business website designer? Probably the first thing is to review the work they have done for other clients. If their portfolio is polished and professional it’s highly likely that their future work will be of the same standard.

Closely following that criterion is customer service. How does the agency treat its clients? Is there a genuine desire to give the client the best website possible to suit their needs and tastes or is there the attitude that the agency knows best and the client should feel lucky that the agency is bothering with him? If the prospective agency want to take time to get a proper brief and gives time to explain the pros and cons of various strategies, this is another very positive sign.

The agency should be able to produce a cohesive strategy that clearly lays out the intended structure of the client’s website, how it will work and why. They should have a range of experts able to add their skills to the site. There should be people with internet marketing skills, communication skills and web designers to put the whole thing together in a pleasing and convincing way.

The agency should be able to recommend or provide web hosting at a reasonable price, suitable to the client’s forecasted needs. They should offer to provide site traffic reports to show the client the success of the site and be willing to tweak the design where any weakness may show. They should be able to show how visitors are using the site and make recommendations to take full advantage of that in producing either increased sales or contacts.

An important contribution of the agency is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This is vital to the success of any business website design. Regardless of how wonderful the site is and how pleased the new owner of it is, if the rest of the world don’t know it exists, the whole effort and expense will have been pointless. The digital agency must have an SEO expert who knows how to register the site with the main search engines and how to get the client’s site as high on the search engine’s list as possible.

Closely linked to that is a service to regularly make changes to the site. Just like human visitors, the search engine spiders get bored with a site that doesn’t change and will downgrade the site in the listings. As a result, the number of visits will fall and subsequently so will sales or contacts. It is therefore absolutely necessary that the site is regularly maintained and updated.

There is no doubt that a good digital agency is crucial to the success of a business website design and the ongoing results that the business obtains from it. Price should be one of the last, not the first criteria that a business owner uses to select a digital agency.