Sites worth a look: a software agency site with no stock photography in it
Most agency websites are indistinguishable from each other: a hero image of a team that is not their team, four adjectives, and a contact form nobody answers. IISAW is a useful counter-example, and the reasons it works are things any small site can copy this afternoon.
It says what it builds, in nouns
Custom software. Web applications. Integrations. Desktop software. E-commerce. Managed hosting. Those are nouns a person can search for, and they are the actual words a buyer types. The fashionable alternative — "digital transformation partners" — is searched for by nobody outside the industry that invented it.
This is the least glamorous advice in search and it remains the most reliable. A page that names the thing it sells, in the words its buyer uses, has already beaten most of its competition.
The portfolio is live software, not screenshots
Each portfolio entry links to something running on a real domain that a visitor can open and use. That is a far stronger signal than a case study, both to a buyer weighing up whether a two-person outfit can deliver, and to a search engine deciding whether the site is what it claims to be.
It is also the discipline that keeps an agency honest. You can write a case study about anything. You can only link to work that still exists.
One contact route, and it is answered
Email and a form. No phone number, no address, no live chat widget that turns out to be a bot. Publishing a channel you do not intend to answer is worse than not publishing it, and a small firm that answers email within the day beats a large one that routes you to a queue.
It is fast because there is nothing in it
Statically rendered, served from a single small container, a handful of fonts and effectively no third-party scripts. Speed on a site like this is not an optimisation project, it is a consequence of having refused to add things. That refusal is the optimisation.
Before you hire anyone to improve a site's performance, count the third-party scripts on it. The answer is usually the whole diagnosis.
What to do about it
- Describe what you sell in nouns your buyer would type, not in the language of your own industry.
- Link to work that is live. A case study proves nothing a link cannot prove better.
- Publish one contact route you will genuinely answer, and delete the rest.
- Audit your third-party scripts before you buy a performance engagement.