How to choose a web agency when you run a contracting business, not a marketing department.
You already know how to buy a subcontractor, and almost none of that instinct gets applied when a contracting business buys a website. It should be, because it is just a trade you do not happen to know.
You already know how to buy a subcontractor. You check the work, you check who is actually on site rather than who came to the meeting, you pin the scope down, you hold a retention and you find out what happens when something goes wrong before it does. Almost none of that instinct gets applied when a contracting business buys a website, because the purchase feels like a different species.
It is not. It is a trade you do not happen to know, bought the same way as any other trade you do not do in house.
Apply the instincts you already have.
Check who is actually on the job
In construction you would never accept "our team will handle it". Ask who designs, who builds and who you speak to in week three. A studio that will not name them is telling you something.
Pin the scope
A defined scope with a fixed price is a lump sum contract. A day rate with an estimate is cost plus. Both are legitimate, and you would never confuse the two on site, so do not confuse them here. Ask which one you are being offered and make them say it plainly.
Ask what a variation costs
Mid-build changes are normal. What matters is whether there is a process or an argument. Ask how a change is priced and approved, and ask before you sign rather than when you want one.
Find out what happens at handover
Who owns the code. Who owns the content. What you can change yourself. What moving to another studio in three years would involve. These are the questions you already ask about O&M manuals, and they matter for the same reason.
What is genuinely different.
Two things do not map onto site procurement, and they are where contracting businesses most often get caught.
A website is never finished. There is no practical completion. Browsers change, dependencies need patching, certificates expire and the platform underneath moves whether you touch the site or not. A quote with no ongoing line has not removed that cost, it has transferred it to you without saying so. Expect somewhere between $99 and $399 a month for a site of this size, ours or anybody's.
The cheapest quote is usually the most expensive one. Not because cheap studios are dishonest, but because a low number almost always means a narrow scope, and the things left out are the things a contracting business specifically needs: a project library with real filtering, a careers section that works and enquiry routing that does not dump a tender invitation in the same inbox as a scaffolding rep.
The three questions that sort the field fastest.
- Show me a site you built for a firm like mine, and tell me what it cost. Vagueness on either half is the answer.
- What will I be able to change without calling you? Get it specific. A project, a team member, a job posting, the order of the homepage.
- What does year two look like? If it is not a number, it is not a plan.
What you should expect to pay.
Our published bands are $7,500 for a complete site without a content system, $12,000 once your own team needs to add projects and roles without a developer, and from $25,000 when what you actually need is a portal or a dashboard with a site attached. Delivery runs from two to three weeks at the bottom to five to twelve at the top.
Other studios will differ, sometimes a lot. The useful thing is not our number, it is having one to compare against, because the hardest part of this purchase is that almost nobody will give you a figure to anchor to.
Before you start.
Look at what the firms doing it well have in common, which we keep as a benchmark of the fifteen construction company websites worth studying. There is a fuller cost breakdown in what a construction company website costs in 2026, and how we work is on construction website design.