Yeah, that's harsh, but i've worked on both sides as well, and can't say you're wrong. Maybe there are some top-quality agencies building maintainable sites, bu

Yeah, that's harsh, but i've worked on both sides as well, and can't say you're wrong. Maybe there are some top-quality agencies building maintainable sites, but I'm yet to see any. Unless it's a throwaway, postcard-type site, design agencies seem a holdover from print, pre-internet, where that model worked. But lower end they're not needed, and once there are real things to do, I don't see how they can compete with internal teams that know the business and can build incrementally refined, VC controlled applications. I work for a big B2B company with a multitude of subcompanies, and maybe it's just bad experiences, but every agency-designed site we have is a badly-architectured piece of crap. Some look shiny, but they're all clearly rushed out, massively overpriced, and integrations with product databases/vendor systems/factory systems are close-to-impossible. And the latter part is key; building UI over those is the key part of my job, I'm designing interfaces to allow people to buy things easily, and agencies don't seem to be geared toward interfaces, rather they're set up to make pretty pictures.