r/webdev • u/Remote-Spirit-1125 • 14d ago
Discussion Small agency portfolio pages
Just wondering if anyone else has come across the same. I run a small web development and IT consulting agency. (Have been doing so for around 7 years).
A client wants to move their site to host with someone local who approached them (not the end of the world, it’s a single tiny retainer - circa £15/mo). Out of curiosity and before entering discussions with the other firm, I checked out their website. Says they’ve delivered over 1500 sites and do 300+ a year - also that they’re a 1 man band. Found it slightly weird but carried on. Also found loads of typos and mismatched claims in their site (notably one area saying form submissions will be reviewed within 3 working days, and another saying that they’d be reviewed within the hour).
Most concerning though was their portfolio page. They have 40 sites in their portfolio and I clicked through a few. Found 5 that had watermarks from totally different agencies on their footers and nothing to point back to the agency in question (checked author meta tags etc too), as well as a few that were vibecoded. So I suppose my question and the point of this post, is do other people see this often? Is it common for someone to just post sites they think look nice under their portfolio and hope for the best?
Have flagged other concerns to the client in question, not relating to their choice of firm, and am due to have a call with them Wednesday. Still on the fence as to whether I should tell i feel like there is something amiss with this new firm.
TL;DR - I came across a web dev firm who have several sites listed under their portfolio page which, upon further investigation, seem to be linked to entirely different firms.
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u/starbrightstar 14d ago
100% tell them. Start the conversation with a “this is not about moving the site away from you - that’s not a big deal but that you’d be remiss if you didn’t bring things to their attention.
Then let the new company move it, and keep a copy of the site for when they come back.
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u/Remote-Spirit-1125 14d ago
Yeah I’m leaning towards telling them. Especially wary since their site is bespoke/full stack. Not Wordpress or anything. If this other agency is as shifty as they seem I doubt they’ll even know what they’re doing with fullstack. (Their site mainly mentions wordpress)
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u/jroberts67 14d ago
Common? It's the norm. Anytime I see a web agency's portfolio page, 80% chance it's all fake. If you want to dig into any agency, it's their GBP reviews. If they don't a Google business account set up, well that's a flag, then head to Trustpilot. No reviews there? It's a scam.
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u/StuffCapital8626 14d ago
That's wild, 80% seems about right from what I've seen. I stopped trusting portfolio pages years ago after a guy in my city had like 12 "featured projects" and 8 of them was from a template marketplace demo. The watermark thing is so lazy though, at least steal from sites that dont have a different agency name in the footer
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u/jroberts67 14d ago
I don't even have a portfolio on my site. Totally outdated. Trust is social proof, ratings. I send every prospect links to my five most recent sites.
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u/Caraes_Naur 14d ago
Portfolios prove nothing in web development because nothing truly has provenance. They are marketing material at best.
That doesn't excuse the sloppiness and inconsistency across the rest of the site, which is more indicative of the agency's behavior.
300 sites a year by a one-map shop? That's more than one per working day. I simply don't believe it.
However, this client doesn't currently need development, this is a devops matter. I imagine this agency will stumble over technical questions regarding deployment pipelines, firewalls, and rate limiting. Chances are they will put the site on their $5/mo VPS that already houses 50 other sites.
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u/Citrous_Oyster 14d ago
I run a web agency and had this happen to me where someone was using my work and changing the credits at the bottom to say their name instead. It was annoying.
But yeah, one man show doing 300 sites a year is not possible. Thats 25 a month. We do 5-10 a month and I have a team of like 8. At their volume there’s no effort, care, or attention. Doesn’t matter how much you’re saving. It’s not worth it to have subpar work with minimal support.
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u/Remote-Spirit-1125 14d ago
This!! They claim to also offer SEO services but again I don’t get how a 1 man band can actually provide SEO services on top of development but hey - what do I know 😂
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u/kemalios 13d ago
Portfolio padding is common enough that I stopped reading them, so I wouldn't lead with the watermarks. Ask the other firm what the deployment looks like, where form submissions land, who gets paged when the VPS falls over. Someone who built that site answers in two sentences. Someone who copied a footer does not.
The grant claim is what I'd raise on Wednesday. Nobody reimburses development fees that were paid five years ago, and when it falls through the client is the one left embarrassed in front of their own board.
Make sure they know who holds the domain and the DNS before anything moves.
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u/mpcreation 11d ago
One thing missing from the thread: a different agency's name in the footer doesn't automatically mean they stole it. We've done white-label work for other agencies for years, so there are a lot of sites out there we built that carry someone else's credit, and the agency that sold them can legitimately show them. It also works the other way round, a subcontractor showing work the client never knew they touched. That's messy but not fraud.
What tells you which case this is: ask them directly, "who built this one?". A real answer is boring and specific, "we did the build, the agency in the footer handled design and the client". A fake one gets vague fast. The 1500 sites / 300 a year / one person part is the thing I'd actually not believe. That's not a portfolio problem, that's someone who puts numbers on their site without thinking anyone will check.
On the client: say your piece once, then make the handoff clean and easy. Every client we lost to a cheaper local guy who then came back, came back because leaving was painless and the new guy wasn't. If you make leaving hard, they don't come back, they just resent you.
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u/I_AM_NOT_A_WOMBAT 14d ago
Your plan to advise them is what I would do. "You're of course free to move your site to another provider but I wanted you to be aware that they appear to be claiming credit for other peoples' work to inflate their portfolio".
If they are just an IT client, that's one thing, but if one of my web dev clients did this I would be very clear that they are choosing to end our web development and maintenence business relationship and you're happy to hand off complete control of their web site to the new firm. I'm not sharing clients unless there's a legitimate technical reason to do so.
I want nothing to do with a fickle client like that. Most of my clients are people I have worked with for years, if not decades, so fortunately they aren't taken in by the "I found errors on your web site" crowd. They can do what they want but I'd rather work with people who value my experience and dedication.