What makes for an amazing website for a web design agency?

What does your agency website need to impress potential clients and garner recognition in your community as having one of the best web design agency websites out there?

Good questions.

To answer them, we’ve put together this list of some exemplary work.

We’ll take an in-depth into each website, explaining to you what your website needs to stand out and be a top web design agency websites.

For our list of best websites, we’ve curated these agency websites among award-winners. Many of the agency websites featured here have won some form of a “Best Web Design Agency Website” award. We scoured awards from organizations like Awwards, Webby Awards, Web Awards, and more. And we’ve also done our own digging beyond that to come up with a well-rounded, comprehensive list of web design agency websites.

It’s important to note that what makes a website one of the “best” differs based on each agency’s audience. Though, obviously there are some standards that you’ll need (e.g. every website on this list is mobile-responsive and features great graphics).

Surprisingly, not every design agency takes the time to build a great-looking website. They end up getting so busy with client work that their own website takes a back-seat.

That’s why it’s essential (especially if you’re just starting out) to invest the time into your own website and moreover the homepage. Before we take a look at the websites themselves, let’s take a look at our must-have elements for any agency website.

What Do the Best Web Design Agency Websites Have in Common?

Aside from just providing snapshots of websites with commentary, we wanted to provide some useful insights for web design agencies that are looking to create their own website to showcase their work and capture new clients.

Having run a web design agency, and also having reviewed all of these amazing websites, it’s clear what makes some websites better than others for web design agencies. Next, let’s break down these elements.

Eye-Catching Homepage

The homepage is the first impression many people are going to get of your web agency. And, since you are a web design agency, first impressions really matter.

Would you trust a barber who showcases a bad haircut?

Or an obese personal trainer?

Your potential customers will need to see examples of what you can do, and not just on your portfolio page.

Your homepage should be one of the best pieces of work you’ve ever put out.

Every one of the best design agency websites has an amazing homepage.

Some elements these great homepages have in common:

• Custom-created icons and graphic elements
• Video hero
• Interactive animations (e.g. entrances on-scroll or on-hover)
• Thoughtful use of color schemes and accent colors
• Unique layouts

Looking through these great homepages that we’ve been curating, it’s clear that a lot of thought and planning went into each of these. Here are some things to think about before you begin building:

1. Who is your target audience
2. What goal do you want to achieve
3. What layout will best help you achieve that goal and connect with that audience
4. What design elements best serve this goal / audience

Some websites can tend to overcrowd their homepages, while others keep them too sparse. There can be a battle over putting too much and not enough information. One the one hand, you might be thinking, “I have a portfolio and testimonials pages, I don’t want to overdo it.” But, the homepage is the first page people will see, and this page must connect with your visitor or they may leave and never come back.

Portfolio

Having a good-looking website for your agency tells prospective clients that you know how to make a good-looking website.

But, can you do the same for clients? Clients who may have very different goals, audiences, and budgets?

The best web design agency websites all have amazing portfolios of their work. The portfolio should show a range of your capabilities.

Showcase the variety of designs in your portfolio. Otherwise, it suggests you use a templated style with little consideration of client-specific customization. It can devalue your service and make you look “cheaper.” So, ensure that there is a variety of designs and styles for you to show off.

Also, one bit of advice, from one agency to another, make sure that the clients in your portfolio are OK with being a reference for you. On occasion, potential clients of yours may look at your portfolio, and reach out to one of your clients. This happened to me more than a few times. Hopefully, most of your clients are happy with your work and willing to be showcased in your portfolio

Contact

This should be a no-brainer.

Your prospective clients need a way to get in contact with you.

Ideally, your contact page is simple and straightforward.

It should have a phone number and a contact form so that people can easily get in touch with you. Have both options for phone and contact form. Customers have different preferences. Some may want to send a message and ask to schedule a call later. Others may be in need of immediate attention and want to get you on the phone right now.

SEO

So, this one is not a need per-se for every single website design agency.

But, if you are providing SEO services to clients as part of the marketing services your agency offers, you should rank well in organic searches related to “web design agency” or “marketing agency”. Having run a web design agency that offered SEO services, I constantly heard from prospective clients, “I searched for ‘best web design agency’ and your website came up. I figured, if you can SEO well for yourselves, you must know what you are doing.”

Doing good SEO for your own agency, as an agency that offers SEO services, is a strong way to validate your skills to prospective clients.

Now, if your web design agency does not offer SEO services, and it relies primarily on word-of-mouth referrals to get new business, maybe SEO is not so important to you. And that’s perfectly fine.

Services

What services do you offer? Every agency is different. Some only do website design. Some logos. While others offer end-to-end “branding” campaigns, which encompass much more than a website.

Luckily you don’t need to make your services page look like an a-la-carte restaurant menu for customers to pick and choose from. But, you should at the very least, specify what services you provide for your clients.

When referencing your services, the more details you can provide, the better. So you may want to consider developing individual pages for each service. These can include:

• Website design
• Branding
• PR
• Strategy
• Video production
• Content marketing
• SEO
• Advertising
• Social media campaigns
• Logo design
• UI design
• UX design

Clean Design

This one is a no-brainer. Obviously, you want a clean-looking design.

But, sometimes that is easier said than done.

In the rush to create a site that has everything you want, sometimes more ends up being too cumbersome.

The best web design agency websites all have clean, thoughtful designs. Every element serves its purpose.

Calls-to-Action

What is the main goal for your web design agency website? Most likely, it’s to get people to contact you.

The tricky thing with calls-to-action making sure they fit in with your overall design. Ultimately, it’s a balance. Your site must be beautiful. But it also must convert visitors into potential clients, otherwise, what is this point?

Be thoughtful about your CTAs, what action you want people to take, and where you want them to go.

Not every one of the great-looking websites we came across had a clear call-to-action.

Some were incredibly beautiful, but don’t take any steps towards getting the visitor to take an action. It’s as if the great-looking design is meant to speak for itself, and the visitor will automatically go to the contact page and reach out to the agency.

Mobile-Responsive Design

In 2019, there’s no question about having a mobile-responsive website. It’s a necessity.

Mainly because a good portion of your traffic is coming from mobile. As of 2018, 52% of all web traffic is from mobile devices. This should be reason enough on its own.

In addition, it’s an expectation of your visitors. Not having a mobile-responsive website seems like an oversight.

And lastly, search engines care about mobile. In March 2018, Google rolled out mobile-first indexing. This means that if your site is not mobile-responsive, you are going to have a much harder time getting visibility in search engine results.

Beyond having a site that is responsive, it’s important to note that the site must look good on mobile as well, not just be readable. There is a difference. It’s pretty easy to make your site mobile-responsive, ensuring that the framework you are using to build your site makes it happen. But, not every site will automatically look good on a mobile device. If you have large images, animations, video hero areas, or unique elements, it might not translate well from a desktop to a mobile phone.So, carefully examine and work your site so that when viewed on a mobile device, it looks especially great.

The Best Web Design Agency Websites

Now, on to the best web design agency websites.

We sourced these from award-winning websites as well as our own exploration across the web.

Keep in mind that each of these agencies has their own target audiences, markets, customers, and goals for their websites. These websites showcase different styles and approaches with their own goals in mind. So, not every design here is necessarily the right approach for your web design agency, but should nonetheless provide some inspiration for your own website.

With that, let’s take a look!

Superrb

Featured in awwwards.

The portfolio here is amazing. The portfolio pieces have stories, with project goals, deliverables, and interesting details like the typefaces and color schemes used on the projects.

Aside from the portfolio, the site has a very unique brand and identity. The theme is “A web design company with a passion for storytelling,” and that comes across through the site’s unique imagery and sample work. Every project has a story, and every client a message they want to convey, and in their portfolio Superrb shows off how they’ve helped clients to tell that story.

The first thing you’ll notice with the site is its clever homepage. It has a well-crafted animation along with a “Making Waves” heading. It’s a really creative concept.

Active Theory

Featured in awwwards

It’s Blade Runner meets a web design agency. And the result is really impressive.

Active Theory is an agency that focuses on digital experiences via web design, installations, apps, VR, and AR.

This site serves to show off this agency’s breadth of impressive work for high-end clients ranging from Harry Potter to Google to Spotify. Though the site does not have a ton of information, it focuses heavily on its portfolio, showing off the agency’s skills. As if to say, “Whatever you need to do in the digital realm, we can do it.” Bottom line. Active Theory let’s their portfolio do the talking.

Fhoke

Overall Fhoke has a very clean, modern look, using accent colors very well.It has a great-looking video hero on the homepage with accompanying animations and graphics. In addition, the color palette is utilized in a very restrained, yet thoughtful way.

This is another example of a site with a great portfolio. If you are looking for a portfolio to emulate, start here.

The portfolio reviews all aspects of the project: scope of the project, design brief, solution, behind-the-scenes, working the project, and results.

Tokyo

Tokyo is a London-based agency that works with top international brands, doing everything from web design to mobile apps to strategy.Their site is yet another example of a web design agency website that has a clean, restrained, and modern look to it. It features a unique layout, highlighting how this agency takes a nuanced approach to web design.

This site takes a very unique approach when it comes to showcasing its portfolio. Right under the hero section on the homepage, the site goes straight into the portfolio. And the portfolio samples are all fantastic-looking. Hovering over some portfolio boxes trigger animations, other  have videos. It’s very well done and looks real sleek.

Wanted for Nothing

Featured on CSS Winner.

Wanted for Nothing is an LA-based agency working on web design, UI/UX, and custom web development work.The design agency website hits all the notes on its homepage. It has a great design and layout. It has calls-to-action. It has portfolio samples. The site also has a lot of unique graphic elements and animations. It’s modern and clean, with all the information a visitor would be interested in, but it doesn’t overwhelm with too much.

Rise

Featured on CSS Winner.

Rise is a Philadelphia-based agency, with a great-looking website.

This homepage keeps your focus. While it does have hover animations, there is not a lot of movement (e.g. videos) on the homepage. It has a more minimalist look, with some excellent graphics work. The homepage, like so many examples here, has portfolio pieces, but it also has testimonials, which makes it stand apart.

Oh, and the transitions between pages looks fantastic.

The services page breaks everything down. And it has sub-pages to get into more details. This site is a great example of how a web design agency doesn’t have to sacrifice information in favor of the overall design.

Zweifeld

Featured in CSS Design Awards

This site kicks ass. Scroll down the homepage and see some really excellent transitions, videos, and sections with information. The menu bar has some opacity to it, which works well with the black and gray backgrounds. It’s real sexy.

This German creative agency really does some exceptional work. The portfolio pages provide in-depth case studies on each highlighted project.

Lounge Lizard

Featured in Design Companies Ranked.

This site doesn’t have the flashy, minimalist homepage akin to many of the other web design agency websites on this list. The New York City-based agency’s site really looks more like a web magazine. The sections are big, taking up a lot of space, with big graphics and pictures. Compared to many of the other sites here, it can come off a bit more cluttered, but it’s a unique approach. 

The website has a lot of information for prospective clients. Providing details on their services, samples of work, and an active blog.

Brown Owl Creative

Featured in Design Companies Ranked.

The website for Brown Owl Creative has a more playful look and feel to it that gives it some personality.

It has a superb grid-style layout that’s simple and minimal.

In addition,he homepage features case studies that also have their own great-looking pages. The purple accent color pops against the gray and white backgrounds. And the iconography has a nice retro feel.

Rezo Zero

Featured in CSS Winner.

The black, white, and gray color palette is stunning. The homepage of Rezo Zero, a French creative studio features a parallax style and a unique look that makes it stand out.

Here, all the elements look like they were chosen deliberately and thoughtfully. The typography, also very unique, stands out. Their tagline is big, bold, and has a modern style with that theme playing out through the rest of the website.

The imagery is simultaneously bold, yet minimalist. The images look like abstract black-and-white photographs, giving the site a bit of a gallery feel.

Mayflower

Featured in CSS Design Awards.

Here is what happens when you have amazing video to work with. This isn’t standard stock video fare for the hero section. It’s amazing eye candy. It’s mesmerizing. Like a Planet Earth documentary. And for a website, especially impressive how high-quality of a video they could display without taking forever to load. I don’t know how they were able to pull that off…

Beyond the homepage video, the site for Mayflower, a French creative agency, also features visually-appealing interior pages that have great imagery, design accents and creative elements, and sections that break up the information nicely.

mStoner

Featured in Web Awards.

Here is an example of an agency that seems to know its customers well, and has a website geared specifically towards a niche.

This web agency, serving higher education customers, is tailored to that target audience. The design is more minimalist, with each element curated to appeal to higher education customers.

mStoner has a lot of portfolio pieces with varying designs to highlight their extensive experience. But beyond that, there is a ton of higher education-focused content. They have blog posts, ebooks, and downloadables. If I were in charge of digital marketing for a university, this agency would definitely be on my short-list.

Parallax

Parallax is a UK-based digital agency that, funny enough,has a website with a parallax design. The homepage looks great. As you scroll, different elements animate. The transitions between sections are gorgeous – as you go from one section to another, and the parallax background image changes seamlessly. It’s very impressive and well done. This site is very creative, showcasing some quality work by their team.

Belle Epoque

This French agency website shows how putting extra care into the little things can make your work stand out. For example, when you scroll on the homepage for Belle Epoque, you see fantastic animations and transitions. The site has a modern and minimal, yet refined design. Overall the site evokes the digital equivalent of a bonsai tree – it has a delicate, crafted look.

Even the portfolio items on the homepage confom to the refined design aesthetic. Often, when you see portfolio excerpts, they are simple color snapshots of the client project. Here, the portfolio items have been carefully crafted to fit within this site aesthetic.

Head Office

This site wins some serious creativity points. Head Office designed their site as an homage to old-school Mac OS from the ‘80s and ‘90s. You can double-click on folders and icons in the folders to see different content. It makes you want to explore the site more and see what you can find.

It’s a beautiful tribute. Though it caused me to laugh a bit initially, it was nonetheless incredibly impressive. This took a lot of thought, planning, and skill to pull it off. The site operates like an old Mac OS. That’s not easy to do with a website!

Loomo

Loomo is a Vancouver agency with a fun, animated website. The astronaut theme throughout the site is whimsical.

The transitions deserve special recognition. Hit the menu button and the moon comes barreling towards you before displaying the menu options. Click on a page, and a rocket blasts off.

This site showcases the creativity of this agency and what they can do with a concept. It’s like they picked the term “astronaut” out of a hat, and then built a full website and branding around this concept, like a skilled improv troupe. It’s excellently executed.

Movetic

The Movetic site has a modern, edgy design. The homepage background is muted, with a lot of animated elements, transitions, and videos that pop.  The design and layout are creative and original. 

One especially impressive aspect of this site is how it flows. Though there is a lot of content on the homepage with different sections showcasing different facets of the agency, it blends together nicely. As you continue to scroll and see different case studies, the background looks like it is continuing the same image. It’s very well planned out and original – I’ve never seen another site like this.

Niika

Niika is an Australian design agency that has a strong artistic website aesthetic .This modern website shows off what can be done with a single page website.

All the relevant information is on the homepage, including their services, clients, portfolio, team, and contact. from services to clients to portfolio to team to contact.  And it’s displayed in a clean layout.

Scroll down and see elegant section transitions and animations float content on by. The animations are what really make this site pop and stand out. Every element seems to have an animation to it as you scroll. It gives the site a weightless, zero-gravity sort of delicate feel that plays well with the minimalist, but bold style.