Designing Your Own Website for Your Agency? Maybe Don’t.

Being good at building websites does not, unfortunately, make your own one any easier to deal with.

You can look at a client’s site for ten minutes and see the design problems immediately because, well, this is literally what you do all day. Then you open your own website and lose two hours deciding whether “Web Design” or “Website Design” feels more you.

Designing your own website is a particularly tricky job for web developers and agency owners because we know enough to have approximately 700 opinions about it. We understand positioning, UX, copy, SEO, design, development, conversions… all the stuff we regularly tell clients to trust us on.

But then it’s our turn, and somehow we’re moving the same testimonial around the homepage for the fourth time this week and considering yet another font change.

At some point, being this close to our business becomes part of the problem. And sometimes the best thing you can do for your website is let somebody who isn’t quite so emotionally involved have a go.

Here are 8 signs you may have reached that point.

#1 You keep redesigning it and somehow it’s still not right

The website is done. Great. Lovely. Finished. 

What’s even better is you’re finally happy with it.

Then your brain starts doing what our web pro brains do: you start picking holes in your design. The hero feels too tall. No, too short. The cards are too boxy. Maybe the buttons are the problem. Are they too angular? Why are there two button styles? Who approved that? Oh… you did.

Give it another week and you’ve mentally redesigned the entire thing.

There’s only so much another shuffle of the homepage can achieve. If you’ve redesigned the thing three times and something still isn’t clicking, I’d start questioning whether another afternoon in Figma or chatting to Claude is really going to be the breakthrough.

Sometimes you’ve simply stared at the website for too long to tell what’s genuinely wrong and what has started annoying you because you’ve looked at it 400 times.

That’s when a fresh pair of eyes becomes very handy.

#2 You know far too much about your own business

When you’ve been inside the business for years, a lot of things start feeling obvious that really aren’t to outside eyes. You know exactly what your “Growth Partnership” includes. You know how one service differs from another.

Your prospect might not.

They haven’t sat through the meeting where you discussed the offer for 90 minutes, and they don’t remember the LinkedIn post where you explained it oh-so-beautifully six months ago. They’ve landed on the website with a problem and would quite like to work out whether you can help them or not in under 30 seconds.

Another web designer gets to question the things you now take for granted.

• What does this mean?
• Would a client understand that?
• Why is this called that?
• Why do these two services sound exactly the same yet have different prices?
• Do people really need to know this?

You may know the business inside out. The website still has to work for somebody who doesn’t.

#3 Everything feels important because it’s yours

With client websites, you can be wonderfully ruthless. 

“That hero banner is giving crypto bro vibes. Bin it.”

“That service doesn’t need homepage space.”

“Nobody wants to read an essay about why they named their company Red Door Media. Let’s get rid.”

Then it’s your own website and you can’t separate the important stuff from the only-important-to-you stuff.

So you convince yourself that all six services should probably get equal space, including the one you’ve only sold twice in four years. And that the award you won back in 2011 still feels relevant and needs to stay. And obviously you can’t cut that paragraph because you really like that paragraph.

Before you know it, the homepage has gained a ton of weight and you can’t possibly get rid of any of it. 

Someone external doesn’t have the same emotional attachment. They can tell you what should get priority, what can move, what needs explaining, and what nobody needs to see yet.

#4 You keep trying to design your way out of a positioning problem

The website feels wrong, so you redesign it. Still wrong. You change the copy. Still wrong. New color palette? Nope, that’s not it either.

Sometimes the website isn’t the problem.

Your agency might be speaking to too many types of clients or maybe your services have grown, and nobody is entirely sure what the main thing is anymore. I’m sorry, but no amount of messing around with the hero section is going to sort that out for you.

A decent external partner will be able to spot this. They should be asking who you want to work with, what you want more of, what you want to be known for, and why good clients choose you.

Once you’re really clear on all that, the rest of the website tends to fall right into place.

#5 You’ve become one of those clients

You know the ones. First comes “Looks great!” Then comes the 600-word follow-up email. Then comes the feedback from three people you’ve never heard of before.

You would NEVER.

Except, apparently, you would.

Working on your own website removes a lot of those lovely and incredibly important boundaries you normally put around client projects. There’s no proper sign-off because you can change your mind whenever you like, and there’s no external person saying, “We agreed this already.”

So you keep going. Tuesday’s final decision becomes Thursday’s “Can we just try something?” And because you’re both client and supplier, nobody is brave enough to tell you to stop.

At some point, another designer may need to take the mouse away from you.

#6 Your own website gets bumped every single week

Every week starts with good intentions. “We’ll get the website sorted this week.” Then a client needs revisions, somebody breaks something, and before you know it you’re moving the task to next Monday in Asana. AGAIN. 

Your own company is the easiest client to disappoint because nobody is chasing you for a deadline.

There’s always something with an actual paying client attached to it that feels more urgent. So your website gets an hour here, an afternoon there, and another little burst of enthusiasm when you randomly decide to work on it late at night.

Six months later, the new site is “nearly there”.

Handing the project to somebody else can be worth it purely because the bloody thing finally gets its own timeline and place on somebody’s priority list.

#7 Some bits just aren’t your bread and butter

You can be very good at websites and still have parts you only sort of do. 

Development. Copywriting. UX. SEO. Messaging. Pick your poison.

If you only touch that skill occasionally and someone else does it every day, they’re probably going to solve the problem faster, spot things you haven’t, and save you a fair bit of faffing around.

Handing that part over might just be the smarter use of everyone’s time.

If copy is one of the bits you’d rather give to someone else, here’s my guide on how to hire a great copywriter (and avoid the bad ones).

#8 DIY is costing you too much time and money

Doing your own website can feel like the money-saving choice because nobody has sent you an invoice. But your time still costs money.

If you spend 50 hours on design, copy, development, SEO, troubleshooting, and all the tweaks you keep making, that’s 50 hours you didn’t spend on client work, sales, marketing, or anything else only you can do.

And let’s be realistic: if it isn’t your main area of expertise, some of those jobs will take you longer too. A professional might sort in two hours what you’ve spent an entire afternoon Googling, testing, undoing, redoing, and eventually deciding to “come back to tomorrow”.

So when you’re comparing the cost of outsourcing with the cost of DIY, count your own hours as well. They’re not free just because you didn’t invoice yourself for them.

Sometimes DIY is absolutely the right call, though

Before anyone sends me an angry message, I am not saying every agency needs to spend €20k having somebody else rebuild its website.

Sometimes DIY makes complete sense. Maybe you’re new. You’re still figuring out what you sell. Cash is tight. The site only needs to explain the basics and give people somewhere to get in touch.

Or maybe you genuinely love working on your own website, can look at it objectively, and are extremely good at all the bits required to make it work.

The point where I’d start thinking differently is when the website is being asked to do more. You’re selling bigger projects, the team has grown, your positioning has changed, or you want the site bringing in better leads.

At that point, “I’ll sort it out myself in one weekend” may have run its course.

Especially if that weekend was nine months ago.

Know when you’ve hit the hand-it-over point

There probably won’t be one moment where the heavens open up and a voice says, “Step away from WordPress.”

You’ll just start noticing the signs.

It might be time to bring someone else in if:

• You’ve redesigned the site several times and still don’t like it
• The website no longer reflects the agency you run today
• Prospects regularly misunderstand your services
• You’ve been talking about “the new site” for months
• Every decision keeps getting reopened
• You struggle to decide what information is important
• You’re attracting the wrong kind of enquiries
• There are obvious gaps in copy, UX, design, development, or SEO
• Client work keeps pushing the project back
• You’re completely sick of looking at it

Hire someone you’ll actually listen to

If you’re going to hand the website over, choose somebody whose opinion you respect enough to occasionally hear the word “no”.

Otherwise you’re paying someone to operate the mouse while you continue doing the whole project yourself.

You want somebody who’ll question things, push back, tell you when a page has too much going on, and explain why a choice works better for your buyers even if it isn’t the one you personally prefer.

And then (this is the difficult bit) you have to let them.

Because if you dictate the strategy, sitemap, copy, layouts, fonts, CTAs, interactions, and exact number of pixels between every section, congratulations. You have successfully outsourced your DIY website while continuing to DIY your website.

Quite an achievement.

Sometimes you need to become the client

You spend all day telling clients to trust the process, listen to the specialists, think about their customers, and stop adding new ideas after everything has been signed off.

Unfortunately, there may come a time when you have to take your own advice.

So go on and hand over the brief, answer their questions, let them challenge you, and resist the urge to pop into the page builder because you’ve just decided the About page feels “a bit off”.

Trust the process, dear agency owner.

You say it often enough. 

Running an agency comes with plenty of weird little problems nobody really warns you about. You’ll find lots more help with them in The Admin Bar community, and if you fancy talking things through with other agency owners, come and join us in Barflies.

For about six minutes.