With how templates, design, and code work on the Internet now looking at a portfolio does little to reassure people of capability. I run a web design company m

With how templates, design, and code work on the Internet now looking at a portfolio does little to reassure people of capability. I run a web design company myself, and the best customers to work with are ones that are decisive rather than needing to be sold an idea for design. Also great are customers that realize that design can be changed later or that precedent in functionality, message, and content rank foremost above site design. With any web dev project it's best to plan what can be done in short phases rather than in huge project launches. We learned from the chaos in Healthcare.Gov (not our project of course) that huge product launches overwhelm teams, face huge delays, and also can result in chaotic deployments. Great leaders that are decisive, studious, considerate, accountable, and calculatedly adventurous are the best customers and I enjoy working with them, also written agreements/contracts are essential to being on time and on budget. In "WebAgency's" defense though, their illustrations do better depict the use of your product, despite perhaps the images not being very flattering. One of the biggest hurdles to overcome on our end as a web design company is marketing, as compared to other companies (larger agencies that do web design). They spend a lot on marketing, and thus that is what makes them even more expensive to hire. These large companies also retain developers and split them across projects, so accountability and focus are at times not as good as what a dedicated development team and project manager could provide. The #1 tell for the risk involved in dealing with a design project is the complexity of the proposed solution. It doesn't not seem that this project was meant to be that complex.... I was shocked by the $45k price tag. It's at least a good thing that I guess the company looks quite profitable. I might be charging my customers way too little on the other hand though... :P