We've never fully understood the fuss around web design.
Not the craft, the craft is real. The fuss. The discovery workshops that produce a slide deck. The six-week "brand discovery" before anyone opens a code editor. The way a five-page website for a business with eleven staff acquires a project manager, a steering group and a RACI matrix.
And the question underneath it, which clients ask us all the time: if you two can build my site in three weeks, why does a big company need a team of ten and eighteen months?
Here's the honest answer, in two halves. The first half is that the ten people are often completely justified. The second is that most businesses are being sold the shape of that team without any of the reasons for it.
What the ten people actually do
When a large organisation builds a website, the work splits. Not because anyone's padding it, but because at scale these stop being the same job:
- A product manager, because with forty stakeholders someone has to decide what's in and what isn't
- A researcher and a designer, because they can't just ask the owner what customers want, the owner has never met one
- A front-end and a back-end developer, because the site plugs into a CRM, an ERP, a payment platform and a twenty-year-old inventory system
- A DevOps engineer, because it has to deploy without downtime across several environments
- A QA tester, because a bug on a site taking a million a week is an incident, not an oops
- A content person, because forty stakeholders produce forty contradictory pieces of copy
- An accessibility specialist and a legal or compliance reviewer, because they're regulated and audited and they will be checked
That's ten, and every one of them is doing something. At that scale, the coordination isn't the overhead. The coordination is the job.
Why they really can't move like we do
Three honest reasons, and none of them are incompetence.
Nobody can decide alone. We can say "put the phone number in the header" and it's there in four minutes. In a large organisation that touches brand, legal, the call centre's capacity planning and someone's quarterly target. The delay isn't the work, it's the permission.
They're carrying twenty years of history. Their website isn't a website, it's the front door of a system estate. Every change risks something nobody remembers building. We usually start with a blank page, which is an enormous, underappreciated luxury.
The cost of being wrong is different. If we break something on a client's site, we fix it that afternoon. If a bank breaks its login, it's on the news. Process is what organisations buy instead of being able to move fast, and it's a rational purchase.
We'd add a fourth: at that size, a lot of the ten people exist to protect the organisation from itself. That's a genuine need. It's just not one an eleven-person business has.
So where does the fuss come from?
From that shape being sold downwards.
The methodology, the discovery phase, the workshops, the retainer, all of it evolved to solve problems that only exist above a certain size. Then it gets packaged and sold to a plumber in Inchicore, because it's what agencies know how to sell and because it justifies the fee.
You can spot it easily enough. A quote with a discovery phase costing more than the build. A timeline where nothing visible happens for six weeks. A monthly retainer with no deliverable you could point at. Jargon standing in for a straight answer.
We're not claiming everyone doing this is cynical. Most people are just running the process they were trained on. But when a small business is charged for the ceremony without the reasons, it's paying for someone else's org chart.
What a small business actually needs
The unglamorous truth is that most business websites need the same eight things:
- Pages that say clearly what you do and where you do it
- Speed on a mid-range phone on mobile data, which is how Ireland actually browses
- A contact form that works and whose emails arrive
- Structure a search engine can read, and the basics of it done properly
- Something you can edit yourself without fear
- Accessibility, so you're not excluding people or breaking the law
- Backups and updates so it's still standing next year
- Someone you can ring who knows your site
That list is achievable in weeks, by a small team, for a knowable fixed price. It's the same list whether you sell haircuts or hydraulics, which is precisely why we can quote it up front rather than discovering it over six weeks.
Our whole Launch service is built around that: three weeks, fixed price, a date you pick. Not because we've found a shortcut, but because we've stopped doing the parts that were never for you.
The bit that's changed
Here's what we'd add in 2026, and it's the reason this article isn't just us being cheeky about big agencies.
Some of what needed ten people five years ago now needs two people and good tools, which is part of when we build lean rather than reaching for a builder. Google's own engineering research puts it well: AI is an amplifier. It makes capable teams considerably faster. It also makes struggling teams break things faster, and it raises delivery instability at the same time as throughput.
So the tools have collapsed the gap in the building. They haven't collapsed the gap in the judgement, which is knowing what to build, what to leave out, and what will quietly cost you customers. If anything, judgement is now the scarce part, because producing plausible-looking output has never been cheaper.
Which means the honest version of the ten-person team isn't "they're wasting money" and it isn't "we do the same thing cheaper". It's that they're solving a harder coordination problem, and most businesses don't have that problem and shouldn't pay for the solution.
What we'd tell you if you rang us
If you're a small or medium business and someone has quoted you a six-figure website with a nine-month timeline, get a second opinion. Not because they're crooks, but because you may be being fitted for a suit that was cut for someone four times your size.
And if you're big enough that ten people is the right answer, you probably already know it, and you're not reading a Dublin agency's blog to find out.
The rest of the time, the answer is a small team who'll give you a straight number, build the eight things above properly, and be at the end of the phone afterwards. That's not a shortcut. It's just what's actually needed, without the ceremony.
Want a straight number? Our estimator gives you one in about a minute with no email required, or have a chat and we'll tell you honestly if we're not the right fit.