When many business leaders choose a web agency, the first round of meetings turns into a “PowerPoint show-and-tell contest.” Company A's salesperson presents 40 pages of beautiful case-study screenshots in the morning, and Company B's account manager shows 50 pages of even flashier mockups in the afternoon. After meeting three agencies, each has confidently promised “fully custom delivery from start to finish, SEO taken care of, and all source code included,” yet you still have no confidence. Who is bluffing, and which team can actually turn our business needs into a working website?
If you want to reveal a web agency's true capabilities in the first 45-minute meeting, the worst approach is to let them recite their generic sales deck. The most effective method is this: Prepare the exact same “miniature 3-page pack of real materials” in advance, hand it to each of the three companies during the meeting, and listen to how they tackle the same problem.
Which 3 things should you bring to the meeting?
You do not need to write a complete tender document. Simply pull these three items from your company's existing materials:
- A link to the 1 specific product or solution page on your current website (or a competitor's site) that dissatisfies you most;
- Actual raw materials for one of your company's main products (for example, an unformatted Word specification document + 2 ordinary photos your sales team typically sends to customers);
- The 3 concerns about buying that customers most frequently raise with your sales team.
Ask these 4 questions on the spot, and the differences become clear
Put the materials on screen. Pay less attention to the salesperson's small talk and focus on their first response to these four specific questions:
| The same-question test you ask | Typical evasive answer from a template-only or subcontracting company | How would an experienced team that truly understands design and development, such as JVDS, respond? |
|---|---|---|
| 1. “As you can see, we only have ordinary photos of this quality and a long specification table. How would you handle these on the page you design?” | “No problem. Our designer will find some attractive high-resolution stock photos to replace them, and we can just paste in the specifications.” (A major trap: This shows they cannot handle real industrial or business data and only know how to use online images to gloss over the problem) | They will point out on the spot: “Generic online images would misrepresent your product. We can cut out the products from your ordinary photos, place them against a consistent background, carefully retouch the industrial lighting and shadows, and add close-up detail callouts with annotation lines and outlines. We would turn the long specification list into a responsive HTML table that supports filtering by key metrics.” |
| 2. “If this old page gets a new URL during the redesign, how will you preserve its existing rankings on Baidu and Google?” | “Don't worry. Our CMS has an SEO plugin built in. Once you fill in the keywords after launch, the rankings will come back naturally.” (An amateur answer: They have no understanding of migrating search authority during a redesign) | They will get specific: “Before the redesign, we will export the list of URLs on the old site that receive traffic. If paths change, we will set up one-to-one permanent 301 redirects at the Nginx level, submit site revision rules through Baidu's webmaster platform, and submit a new Sitemap in GSC. We will also lock the titles of core pages to prevent arbitrary changes.” |
| 3. “If we sign the contract this week, who will attend meetings and communicate with us afterward? Do you write the frontend code yourselves or use drag-and-drop plugins?” | They vaguely say “A dedicated project support representative will coordinate with you,” or avoid discussing how the frontend is implemented | They clearly tell you that the lead designer and frontend engineer will join the group chat to work with you directly. They can also open the source code of one of their previously launched projects on the spot and point out its clean semantic markup and very fast loading performance |
| 4. “With this budget, which of our requirements do you think should be dropped from phase one?” | To win the contract, they readily promise, “We can do all of it. Everything you've mentioned is included!” (After signing, the scope will inevitably shrink or extra charges will appear everywhere) | They are willing to speak honestly in terms of your conversion goals: “Your budget and time are limited. Nobody will use that complicated members' forum in phase one, so we recommend cutting it. Put all the savings into the core product selection pages and landing pages localized for English-speaking audiences.” |
Use the same real materials to test these four questions, and within half an hour you will be able to see clearly who is just a sales intermediary reciting a script and who is a seasoned practitioner with hundreds of real projects behind them.
