How to Choose a Web Design Agency (From a One-Person Agency)

I wrote the first version of this post in 2019. It opened with a Steve Jobs quote, told you a web design agency offers "bundled expertise from various areas", and ended with a checklist of ten green checkmarks. It read like every other agency guide on page one, because that's what it was written to look like.

It also left out the one thing you should know before taking advice from me: Wunderlandmedia is one person. When you hire my "agency", you get me, Kemal, working from Augsburg, with 8+ years and 100+ projects behind me for clients in the US, Canada, Australia, Switzerland and Germany. No account manager and no junior team.

So this is the rewrite. It's about choosing who designs and builds your website, nothing else. If you're shopping for ongoing marketing or SEO, I'll point you to the right posts along the way, because those are different hires with different questions.

"Agency" Is a Word, Not a Team Size

Anyone can put "agency" on a website. There's no license and no minimum headcount. I use the word myself, and I'm a team of one.

The label tells you almost nothing about who will touch your project. Behind it you'll usually find one of these setups:

• A real studio with designers and developers on payroll who build your site themselves.
• An agency shell: a sales and account management layer that hands the actual build to freelancers or a white-label partner.
• A solo developer calling themselves an agency, like me.
• A reseller who generates a site with an AI tool and flips it. I wrote a whole post on how to spot a real web developer vs. an AI website reseller, so I'll skip that one here.

The second setup is more common than agencies like to admit. I know because I've been on the other side of it: I've contracted for agencies, and the end client never needed to know my name. Nothing about that is illegal or even unusual. But you should know whether it's happening before you sign, because it changes who you're actually trusting with your website.

So the real freelancer vs. agency question has little to do with size. It comes down to who writes the code, and whether you can talk to them.

Who Will Actually Build Your Site?

Ask this in the first call, word for word: "Who will design my site, who will build it, and can I talk to them directly?"

A good agency answers with names and roles, and tells you up front if part of the work goes to an outside partner. Hesitation, or "our team handles that" without a single name, usually means the work leaves the building.

Then ask what happens to your project when that person is on holiday or sick. This is where agencies earn their higher rate, because someone else can step in. It's also where I'm weakest. If I get sick, your project waits. I've written about why I refuse to scale my one-person agency, and AI tools haven't changed this part. Claude helps me build faster. It doesn't cover for me when I'm in bed with a fever.

What I can do is make that dependency less dangerous: you own the domain, the hosting account and the code, and the site runs on something another developer can pick up without calling me. Ask any agency for the same. If the answer is "only we can maintain it", you've bought a website plus a permanent dependency on one vendor.

When an Agency Is the Better Call

I've competed with agencies for projects for years, and some of those projects belonged with them.

An agency makes sense when you need several disciplines landing on the same date: brand identity, copywriting, photography, design and development, all in parallel. It makes sense when your procurement department wants a contract with a firm that has redundancy and a legal team. It makes sense when you need things I don't do at all, like paid ads management. And it makes sense when the website is one piece of a bigger campaign that needs a creative director holding it together.

A solo developer or a small studio makes sense when the scope is defined, you want to talk to the person building it, and you'd rather pay for the work than for the overhead around it. Agency pricing includes the office, the sales team and the account managers. That overhead pays for real things, redundancy above all. Just know which line of the quote it's hiding in.

If what you need is ongoing marketing across several channels, that's a different decision. I covered it in how to choose a digital marketing agency.

Questions I'd Ask Any Web Design Agency, Including Me

The 2019 version of this post told you to look for "fair hourly rates" and "the right chemistry in face-to-face meetings". Here's what I'd ask instead.

"Why this platform for my site?" Every agency has a favorite stack, and that's normal. What you want is a reason tied to your situation: who updates the content, how often, what it costs to run each year, and who can maintain it if you part ways. "We always use WordPress" describes a habit. It says nothing about your site. I wrote down how I decide between WordPress, Next.js and Astro so you have something to compare against.

"What does this cost per year after launch?" The build price is the number everyone negotiates. Hosting, licenses, plugin renewals and maintenance are the numbers that bite later. Get them in writing before you sign.

"Who owns the domain, the hosting, the code and the design files?" You, for all four. Put it in the contract, and run through my website project handoff checklist at the end so nothing stays locked in someone else's account.

"Will this redesign change my URLs?" If your current site ranks, a relaunch without proper redirects can throw that away. Ask how they handle it. If they look confused, bring my website migration SEO checklist to the meeting.

"Can you show me a site you built two years ago that's still live?" Launch-day screenshots are easy. Sites that still load fast and still get updated two years later are the real portfolio.

"What's not included?" My favorite question. A good proposal is specific about its edges: content writing, stock photos, extra revision rounds, translations, SEO beyond the basics. A vague proposal turns into a stack of change requests.

Red Flags in a Web Design Proposal

Most red flags show up in the written proposal, not on the sales call. On the call, everyone is at their best.

These are the ones I'd walk away from:

• Design before discovery. Mockups of your new homepage before anyone asked who your customers are or what the site should get them to do. That's a template with your logo on it.
• "SEO included" as a single line item. SEO isn't a checkbox at the end of a build. If search matters to your business, vet that part separately with the questions to ask an SEO consultant, even if it's the same agency doing both.
• A page builder plus a long plugin list for a ten-page brochure site. I've untangled WordPress sites running 23 plugins. Every plugin is a future update, a possible conflict and a possible security hole.
• Domain or hosting registered in the agency's name. Convenient for them, a hostage situation for you the day you want to leave.
• No maintenance line, or "lifetime" anything. Hosting and domains cost money every year. Somebody pays, and it's going to be you.
• A fixed price with no scope document. A low number with a fuzzy scope becomes a high number with change requests.

Why Web Design Quotes Are All Over the Place

The 2019 version had a price table running from 2,000 euros for a simple company site up to 100,000 euros and more for enterprise platforms. Those ranges weren't wrong. They just didn't help anyone decide, because quotes for what sounds like the same site can be miles apart and a table can't tell you why.

The gap usually comes from four places. The scope isn't written down the same way, so each agency is quoting a different project in their head. The overhead differs: an agency with account managers and an office has to price that in, and a one-person shop doesn't. The amount of custom work differs, from a tweaked theme to a design built from scratch. And what happens after launch differs, from "you're on your own" to a maintenance plan with a response time.

The fix is boring and it works: write a short brief, send the same brief to every agency, and compare quotes line by line instead of by the total at the bottom. If you want ballpark numbers before you start, I broke down how much a small business website costs and what drives the price up.

What the First Weeks of a Project Should Look Like

The old post listed six project phases, from "initial consultation" to "aftercare", with a bullet list under each. The phases were fine. What it never told you is what to watch for in each one.

A well-run project spends its first stretch asking questions, not drawing. Who are your customers? What should they do on the site? Who will edit content, and how often? What does your current site rank for? What does it need to talk to, like a booking tool, a CRM or a shop? Only then does it make sense to plan the structure, then design, then build.

Along the way, a few things tell you how the project is really going. You should see work in progress, not a single "big reveal" at the end. Testing should happen on real phones and browsers, not "I checked it on my iPhone". And launch day needs a plan for redirects, analytics and a backup, because launch day is when old URLs break and forms quietly stop sending. And the real content should exist before the final design gets signed off, or you'll end up redesigning around text nobody planned for.

Aftercare is the phase most proposals skip. A website needs updates, backups and someone who notices when something breaks. If nobody is assigned to that, it's still your job, you just haven't been told yet.

What I'd Tell a Friend Choosing a Web Design Agency

I can't tell you whether an agency or a solo developer is right for your project without knowing the project. Some of you need a team of twelve. Some of you need one person who picks up the phone.

What I'd tell a friend is this: find out who actually builds the site, make sure you own everything, get the yearly running costs in writing, and read the proposal for what's missing instead of what's promised. The label on the door matters a lot less than those four things.

I can't promise you a team that covers every discipline. What I can offer: you talk to the person who designs and builds your site, from the first call to the last fix. If that sounds right for you, have a look at how I handle web development projects or let's talk.