Why Web Agencies are Shit

The reason I’ve had to do that is because:

• Web Agencies are shit
  • They are not built to serve startups
    • what is in scope and what is not in scope is a very blurry line that never works in your favour
    • ‘we do agile’
    • i’ll put it into ‘our’ schedule for us to do for you when we feel like it
    • they work in a waterfall methodology and they are not interested in or built for rapid iteration or learning
    • they are expensive and work on an hourly basis (not deliverables basis) – and when your budget runs out there is no sympathy regardless of whether they’ve done their job or not
    • they spend their time on beautiful looking mocks rather than actually building useful products – i.e. focus on the wrong things
    • they are usually run by non-technical people (e.g. sales people) who aren’t able to properly understand what it takes to build quality products
    • they are lazy – they work with what they know – if that’s Shopify they only do Shopify and are blind to everything else regardless of whether that’s the right solution for you
    • don’t expect them to care about you once they’ve delivered something, you’re all on your own then – whether it’s patching updates or fixing something that’s crashed
    • they are not invested in solving your problems or your customers problems, if you are non-technical and haven’t done your research on your customer or know the language these guys are going to rip you a new one
    • basic tools to ensure basic running of your website and uptime will not come with your website
  • Examples:
    • “cowboy coder” – small agency (less than 5 people) – well intentioned and cheap
    • Facts:
      • initial build: 3 months – $16K
      • architecture: joomla + custom development
        • website was hacked into after 2 years
        • couldn’t get google analytics, e-commerce tracking to work
        • couldn’t get google tag manager in
        • had to rebuild the website again – took a few months
    • but:
      • no follow-up service and very slow to deliver – often weeks without hearing from him once website was delivered
      • doesn’t always follow instructions correctly and limited knowledge of how to do things often relying on subcontractors to do the bulk of the work, especially custom development work
      • no documentation for anyone to take over the website
      • built off a free platform but hacked into core files which meant upgrading and patching was impossible unless you rebuilt the entire website – leading to unsecure website with our website getting hacked and learning that we were off an infrastructure version of 1.8 and the latest one was 3.6
      • built pages off the core templates which meant any patching or changes could inadvertently adversely effect the overall functionality or look of the website
      • no direction on U/X