Agencies manage multiple clients and you cannot expect the undivided attention of your design and development team. But it’s a bad sign if whoever is paying your agency the most, or shouting the loudest, gets the most attention. Because as a start-up, it’s unlikely to be you.
And the trouble is, if things go wrong and an agency leaves you half-way through your web-build, the work done may be useless to any other development team. This was so in Ryan’s case. He explains: “I had spent half of my budget, but I thought I had about three quarters of the site on the CD, so I didn’t think it was too bad. I thought I could give that CD to the next set of developers. I couldn’t.”
In the end, Ryan found a freelance developer who rebuilt the site. The new developer, who was paid at a daily rate until the project was finished, could only use around 10% of the other agency’s code.
Ryan is certain that the key to his site’s success the second time round was down to effective communication: his new developer’s offices were right across the street. The pair even became good friends.
Now Ryan’s business site, MyBuilder.com is going strong, and he has an in-house web team to support it. He’s says he’s able to see the good from the bad: “In hindsight I made a poor decision. But at the time I looked at lots of different companies, I thought they were alright and the price was pretty good.
“It just really went poorly. A lot of time needs to be spent working out how the website is going to work and so on. We just didn’t spend enough time on that upfront.”