How to Choose a Web Design Agency in Kolkata: 9 Questions to Ask Before You Sign Anything

Kolkata has hundreds of web design companies. Some are excellent. Many are three people and a folder of themes. From the outside, on a portfolio page full of screenshots, they look identical.

Screenshots are the problem. Every agency shows you finished visuals, and finished visuals tell you almost nothing about how a project will actually go — whether the site will still work in two years, whether you will own it, whether anyone will answer the phone in month four.

So here are the nine questions we would ask if we were hiring an agency rather than being one. Most take thirty seconds to answer. The answers separate studios that will do good work from studios that will hand you a problem.

1. Who is actually going to do this work — and can I speak to them?

In a lot of agencies, the person who sells the project is not the person who builds it, and you never meet the second one. That handover is where scope, context and half the good ideas disappear.

What a good answer sounds like: a named designer and a named developer, and an offer to put you in the same room as them before you sign.

Red flag: vague references to “our team” and a refusal to name anyone. Also worth asking directly whether the work is being subcontracted, and to whom.

2. Can you show me three sites you built that are still live — and still being used?

Portfolios are curated at the moment of launch. What matters is what the site looks like after two years of a real client adding real content to it.

Ask for live URLs, not images. Then open them on your phone. If a site an agency is proud of has become slow, broken or visually chaotic, you are looking at your own future.

Bonus question: “Which of these has the client since replaced, and why?” An agency that answers this honestly is one you can trust with bad news later.

3. Who owns the code, the domain, the hosting and the accounts when we’re finished?

This is the single most important question on the list, and the one clients ask least.

We regularly meet businesses in Kolkata who cannot move their own website because the domain is registered in the agency’s name, the hosting is on the agency’s account, or the site is built on a proprietary system that only that agency can edit. What was sold as convenience is leverage.

What a good answer sounds like: you own the domain, the hosting account, the analytics and the code outright, in your own name, with credentials handed over at launch.

Red flag: any version of “don’t worry, we handle all that.”

4. What is your process before you open a design tool?

If the answer is “you send us your content and we’ll design around it,” you are buying assembly, not design.

A studio working design-first spends the first stretch of a project on questions instead of pixels: who is this site for, what are they deciding, what do they need to see before they trust you, what does this page have to make them do. That work is why two sites with the same page count perform completely differently.

At Bulb Studio we call the deliverable of that stage the reason the rest of the project goes fast — you cannot design a page well until you know what job it is doing.

5. How will we know if this worked?

Most web projects are declared successful on the day they go live, which is the one day they cannot possibly be judged.

Ask what will be measured — enquiries, form completions, calls, bounce on key pages, time to first contact — and who is setting up the measurement. If nobody mentions analytics, conversion tracking or Search Console in the proposal, the project has no definition of success and you will never be able to tell whether you got value.

6. What is not included in this quote?

The most useful question in any agency conversation, because it inverts the incentive. You are asking them to volunteer the gaps.

Listen for: copywriting, photography, stock licences, SEO setup, schema markup, analytics configuration, content migration, training, post-launch support, third-party plugin or platform fees, and the number of revision rounds.

A quote that is ₹60,000 cheaper because it excludes copy and photography is not cheaper. It has just moved ₹60,000 of work onto your desk.

7. Who is writing the words?

Content is where Indian web projects die. The design is approved, the build is ready, and then everything stops for six weeks while somebody at the client’s office tries to write an About page between other jobs.

Establish this up front. Either the agency writes it (and you should see writing samples), or you do (and you need a deadline and a brief), or you split it. Any of the three works. The version that fails is the one where nobody said.

8. What happens in month four?

Launch is not the end of the relationship, it is the start of it. Plugins need updating, platforms change, something breaks, and you will want changes.

Ask specifically: what does support cost, what is the response time, what counts as a bug fix versus a billable change, and can we get small edits done without a formal quote every time. Get it in writing. “We’ll look after you” is not a support agreement.

9. What happens if we disagree about a design decision?

This one surprises people, but it predicts the experience of the project better than almost anything else.

An agency that says “you’re the client, we’ll do whatever you want” is offering you comfort and abdicating expertise — and you will end up with a site designed by committee. An agency that cannot explain a decision in business terms is offering you ego.

The answer you want is a process: they explain the reasoning, you explain the constraint they may not know about, and the decision goes to whoever has the better argument. We are open about being design-led, which means we will push back on requests we think will cost you customers. Clients find that uncomfortable in week two and thank us in month six.

Five red flags worth walking away from

Some answers should end the conversation rather than start a negotiation.

“We’ll do it in five days.” A genuinely custom site cannot be researched, designed, built and tested in five days. What is being offered is a theme with your content in it, which is fine — but it should be priced and described as one.

A quote with no scope attached. A single number in an email with no page list, no deliverables and no timeline is not a quote, it is an opening position. The scope will be defined later, by whoever is more confident in the argument.

Portfolio work they cannot link to. Screenshots with no live URL usually mean the site was never launched, the client left, or it was not their project. Ask once. If the answer is evasive, that is your answer.

No questions about your business. If an agency can quote your project without asking what you sell, who buys it, or what a customer is worth to you, they are pricing a page count. You will get a page count.

Pressure to decide this week. Discounts that expire on Friday belong in retail. A studio confident in its work does not need urgency to close a project that will take three months.

How to actually run the shortlist

Three agencies is the right number — enough to see the range, few enough to compare properly.

Send all three the same brief, in writing, including what the site needs to achieve rather than just what it should contain. “Generate enquiries from mid-size manufacturers in eastern India” produces better proposals than “we need about twelve pages.”

Then compare on three axes only: what is included, who does the work, and what happens after launch. Design taste you can judge from the portfolio in ten minutes. The other three take a conversation, and they are what determine whether the project goes well.

Finally — and almost nobody does this — call one past client. Ask two questions: did it launch roughly on time, and would you hire them again. Five minutes, and it is worth more than every proposal document combined.

A note on price in the Kolkata market

Kolkata is a competitive, price-sensitive market, and you can find someone to build you a website for ₹15,000. You can also pay ₹5,00,000. Both are real prices for real things — we broke down exactly what changes between them in our guide to what a website actually costs in India.

The practical advice: get three quotes, and if one is dramatically lower, do not assume it is a bargain or a scam. Assume it is a different scope, and use question 6 to find out where the difference is hiding. Nine times out of ten it is in design, content and support — the three things that determine whether the site earns anything.

The short version

You are not really choosing a portfolio. You are choosing how the next three months will go, and who you will be able to call in year two.

Ask the nine questions. The agencies worth hiring will enjoy answering them.

Frequently asked questions

What should a good website cost in Kolkata? Anywhere from ₹30,000 for a straightforward business site to ₹5,00,000+ for a corporate or custom build. The number depends far more on how much design, content and engineering is included than on the number of pages.

Should I hire a Kolkata agency or one from Delhi, Mumbai or Bangalore? For most projects, working with a local studio makes the process easier — you can meet, and communication is faster. But the work itself is location-independent, so judge on process and proof rather than postcode. A Kolkata studio can and does serve clients across India and internationally.

How long should a website project take? Four to ten weeks for most business and corporate sites. If an agency promises a full custom site in one week, they are using a template. If a straightforward site is taking six months, something has gone wrong with content or approvals.

Do I really need to own the domain and hosting myself? Yes, without exception. Register the domain in your business’s name and keep the credentials. It costs nothing extra and it means you are never trapped with an agency you have outgrown.

How do I check an agency is legitimate? Look for a registered business, a real address, named team members, live client sites you can open, and reviews on Google or a third-party platform such as Clutch. Then call one of their past clients. Almost nobody does this, and it tells you more than anything else.

Working through this list with a shortlist of agencies? Happy to answer all nine on a call — and if we’re not the right fit for your project, we’ll tell you who is. Book a call with Bulb Studio →