Most of the businesses that contact us want a site their category ends up measuring itself against, and a good number of them are coming off a build that went the other way. The stories come out early, and they rhyme. The budget blew out, the review link arrived full of broken things and half the features promised in the pitch were withdrawn partway through the build. Once the site launched, every change went back to the agency at their hourly rate.
The budget that kept growing
A budget grows when there's nothing to hold it against. If nobody agreed at the start what the site had to achieve commercially, every new idea in the build looks reasonable (a members' area here, a second product filter there), and none of them can be turned down because there's no agreed brief to turn them down with. The quote priced the site the agency imagined. Each gap between that site and the one the business needed came back as a variation, a few thousand dollars at a time, after the important decisions had already been made on the wrong assumptions.
We do the scoping before we put a number down. Discovery maps the customer journey, the content and the systems the site has to sit beside. The proposal is priced against what it finds. Once that scope is agreed the price is fixed, and anything new gets quoted before it's built, which keeps the final invoice at the number you approved unless you've chosen to change it. There's more on how we price a website if you want the detail.
A review link full of broken things
When a review link arrives with buttons going nowhere, a contact form that never sends and pages that fall apart on a phone, the client has been made the tester. Whatever they miss goes live.
Review should be spent on judgement calls, like whether a page says the right thing. Everything mechanical gets tested before you see it, page by page and form by form, through every checkout flow and on the browsers and devices your customers use. Catching a form that doesn't fire takes us an afternoon in testing, and missing it costs you every enquiry that went nowhere before somebody noticed.
Features that disappeared mid-build
In the pitch, everything was possible. The booking system would sync, stock would update itself and the members' area would be simple to run. Somewhere in the middle of the build the answers changed: the platform couldn't do it natively, or it could with an app that added a monthly fee, or the integration had never been in the scope at all. Functionality agreed in a sales conversation, before anyone has checked how it will work, comes apart like this once the build reaches it.
Most of our clients arrive knowing which accounting system, freight partner or booking tool they're keeping. During strategy we map exactly how each one will function inside the site, including what the platform handles on its own and what needs an app, and we do it before the scope is written. We scope, manage and facilitate those connections, while the technical build of each one sits with the platform or app vendor, so by the time you sign you know whether the thing you're picturing exists and what it will cost to run each month.
Support you can't get out of
A month after launch someone needs to change a price, add a new hire to the team page or swap a photo. None of it can be done in-house. Each change goes back to the agency as a ticket at an hourly rate. Before long the support agreement feels less like a service and more like rent. Sometimes that comes from a rushed build, and sometimes from a business model that does well out of it, since a client who can't edit their own site keeps paying.
We build every Webflow and Shopify site so your team can handle routine changes themselves, with the CMS set up around the content you'll be updating week to week. Before we hand anything over, the people who'll be doing the editing get a proper working session on running it. Clients who want ongoing support use it for new pages, new features and bigger changes. Either way, your own team runs the day-to-day. If you're checking where you stand with a current agency, our piece on agency red flags covers who owns the workspace, the code and the domain.
Advintage: a complex build that went live clean
When someone asks whether a big, complicated build can come in without any of the four stories above, Advintage is the project I point to. Their move from Magento to Shopify carried more than 5,000 SKUs, layered discount and stock rules, wholesale pricing and an ERP integration. It went live with zero customer downtime.
