Creative Agency Website Design

What it can look like for creative agencies

We built this Signal demo ourselves as an example of its form, not a paid client website. It consists of five sections with animations driven by scroll position: the scroll wheel acts as a time driver, so visitors can move forward, backward, or stop anywhere and land on a complete frame at each stop. The animation is built with Remotion, allowing the same layout to be rendered as an MP4 for social media channels. This type of design falls under the Business package and requires full working time, so if your target is to go live this month, we usually recommend a simpler version first.

What you get

For a creative agency, the content that potential clients actually read is usually this:

• Case studies per project that contain the initial brief, obstacles along the way, the decisions you made, and the final results
• The work you do in-house and the work you do with partners, written openly
• The range of costs or the smallest project size you accept, so that filtering happens before the first call
• The people behind the agency: name, role, and previous work experience
• The work stages from brief to delivery, with an estimated time for each stage and what you need from the client
• Company information, address, and payment method, which is always asked by the financial department of large clients
• One clear contact channel, with information on how long it usually takes for you to respond

What we do not recommend at the beginning: building your own website with the most complex techniques that your team masters. The temptation is great, because the agency website feels like a work that also judges you. The problem is, work with self-determined deadlines always loses to work with client-determined deadlines, and the ambitious version usually stops halfway. Publish a version that is complete with necessary features first, collect case studies in it for a few months, then build a version that makes people stop scrolling.

Pricing for a creative agency website

An agency with well-prepared content and only needing a place to display it can start with the Starter package, Rp 1.500.000, which already includes a domain, hosting, and SSL for the first year, and can be completed in around 3 days since we receive your complete materials. In practice, materials are rarely an obstacle for agencies, because photos and writings are usually already available.

When each project wants to have its own case study page with large images and motion, the Business package, Rp 5.000.000, with a processing time of 1 to 2 weeks is more suitable. In this package, images are stored in Cloudflare CDN so that visually-rich pages remain fast to open, and there is a blog to write process notes. A comparison of the contents can be found on the package page.

Questions we often get from creative agencies

Your team can actually make it themselves. Why go through another party?

If this month we have a completely empty capacity, do it yourself, the result will be more in line with your taste than anything we create. What we usually do in agency cases is just one thing: taking a job with a self-determined deadline, then giving it an external deadline. Just count how many times this agency website has been on the worklist and then postponed. If it's more than twice, that's the answer.

We are an agency too. Can we work on a website for our clients?

Yes, and there are three things that need to be agreed upon from the start: whose name appears as the creator, who directly communicates with the end client, and in whose name the domain and hosting are registered. We are used to being behind you if that's the agreement. Regarding domain ownership, we discuss it in this article, and its terms should be written in your contract with the client, because an agreement that only exists in a chat is difficult to use when there's a dispute a year later.

Most of our work is bound by confidentiality agreements. How do we display them?

Display what is allowed, then for the rest, write a case study without a name: mention the type of business, the size of the job, and the problems solved, without a logo and without the client's numbers. This method forces you to write about the process, which is actually the most interesting part to read. Request written permission for those whose names you want to mention, along with when their project has just been completed, because a year later the person who originally handled the project has usually changed jobs.

Do case studies have to include result numbers such as sales increases?

If you have the numbers and the client allows it, include them along with how they were measured and the time frame. If you don't have them, don't make them up, because potential clients in this field read dozens of similar pages and are familiar with unsubstantiated numbers. Replace them with things you can be accountable for: how long the project took, how many rounds of revisions, and what decisions changed the direction of the work halfway through.

Does a website agency have to be heavily animated to look capable?

It depends on what you sell. An agency that sells motion is indeed judged by its movement, and the demo on this page is an example. An agency that sells brand strategy or writing is more helped by a page that is calm and fast, because what is judged is the clarity of thought. One thing applies to both: a page that takes four seconds before displaying the first text loses the person who is comparing five agencies at once.