How to make a creative agency website that wins the pitch

TL;DR: How to make a creative agency website

This guide covers the site a marketing director lands on while building a shortlist. You'll register a domain, start from an agency template in Yola website builder, and add the six pages that carry the decision: home, work, services, team, about and contact. The services step gets into how you describe brand identity, campaign creative and content production, and how to show whether an engagement is a project fee, a retainer or a rate card.

The second half is about proof. Case studies written as a brief, what you made and what changed for the client, with numbers only where the client has cleared them, plus a project inquiry form that asks for a budget and a start date, the credentials an agency can honestly show without a licence, a page for talks and hiring days, and search for "creative agency [city]" as well as "[industry] marketing agency". Work through the ten steps and the next shortlist starts from your site rather than from an attachment.

What to include

Top features of a creative agency website

How to make a creative agency
website in 10 steps

Your domain is what somebody types after a referral, a conference badge or a line in an email signature, so use the agency's name and nothing cleverer. Take the .com where it's free. If you're known by a short form of the name, register that too and point it at the same site.

Leave out hyphens and numbers. An agency name repeated over the phone loses both, and the caller ends up somewhere else. Agencies also collect domains: campaign microsites, a recruitment address, an old name from before the merger. Keep them, point the ones you still own at the main site, and let the agency itself live on one name that matches your Google Business Profile and the address your invoices go out from.

Yola website builder lets you search for and register a domain in the same flow you build the site in, and annual plans include a free domain for the first year.

Agencies are the last people who need convincing that a website matters, and usually the last to finish their own. The reason is always the same: the site is the one job with no client waiting on it, so it slides behind billable work for another quarter. A builder you edit like a document is what stops that happening, because the person who writes the case study can also publish it.

Nobody needs to write code here. Yola lets you edit text, swap images and move sections yourself, and answering a few questions about the agency gives you a first draft from the AI Website Builder to work from. The full set of AI tools sits on the paid plans and the free plan has basic AI, so treat what comes back as a starting layout and write the work sections yourself. Hosting, an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups come with the site.

Start from a template that already has a work grid, a services section and a team block in it. Your designers will want to change the type and the colours, which is the fun part and takes an afternoon. Building the structure from nothing is the part that takes a month you don't have.

Start from a template

Creative agency website templates

Six pages carry a shortlist decision. Keep the set that small on purpose, because every extra page is one more thing that goes quietly out of date while everyone is on client work.

Insights sits outside the six, and it's worth being honest about why. Yola has no blog block, so anything you publish is a page you add by hand. Two or three pieces that genuinely say something about how you work are better than a feed that stops three months after launch, and an empty thinking page is the first thing a marketing lead reads as a warning sign.

Build these six first, then add anything else once the essentials are live:

Name your services the way you'd name them in a scope of work, not the way they'd read on an awards entry. A marketing director looking for a rebrand searches for brand identity, and "transformative brand experiences" doesn't come up. Only list what you deliver now: a paid media line you haven't run since your last media buyer left is an inquiry you'll have to hand straight back.

Say what each engagement includes and where it stops. Brand identity that ends at a logo and brand identity that ends at a full guidelines document with rollout support are different jobs at different money, and being vague about which one you sell costs you a scoping call per inquiry. Web design and build is the one that catches agencies out most often, because half the market means design only and the other half means design through to a live site.

Then deal with money without pretending you can publish a rate card. Most agencies sell three shapes: a fixed project fee, a monthly retainer and a day rate for overflow work. Say which of those you offer, give a starting figure where you have one you'll honour, and say plainly that anything else is quoted against a brief. Yola's ready-made Services and Pricing blocks hold a service name, a short description and a figure together, so whoever runs new business can change a starting rate the day it moves.

Where one service brings in enough inquiries on its own, give it a page and build it around two of your own projects in that discipline. A branding page with the rebrand you ran last year written up underneath it does work that a line in a list never will.

This is the step the shortlist is decided on, so it gets the most of your time. A case study is three things in order: the brief you were given, what you made, and what changed for the client afterwards. Agencies are good at the middle part and skip the other two, which is why so much agency work online looks handsome and proves nothing. Write the brief in the client's words, not in yours.

Numbers go in only where the client has agreed you can publish them. Ask for that in writing while the project is still warm, and ask for a specific figure over a general compliment. Where the answer is no, say what changed in plain language without the number, or describe the sector instead of naming the client. A result with no client, no timeframe and no source behind it is worth nothing on a pitch page and a marketing lead will discount the whole case study because of it. If you can't stand it up, leave it out.

Then photograph the work properly. Identity work wants clean flat artwork plus the thing in use, on a pack, a van, a storefront, a stand. Campaign work wants the actual placement rather than a mockup. Shoot straight on and in good light, get the client's sign-off on what's public, and check your contract before you publish anything from a project still under embargo. A showreel or a case study film earns its place on bigger work; Yola doesn't host video, so you host it elsewhere and drop the link on the project page.

Name the files for what they show, harper-foods-rebrand-packaging.jpg rather than final_v7.jpg, and put the same description in the alt text so the work turns up in image search. Yola's ready-made Galleries block will hold a project set as it comes, and on a paid plan the Custom code block lets you lay a gallery out exactly the way your designers want it. Paid plans also include 1M premium icons for the supporting pieces of the page. Three case studies written properly beat twelve thumbnails with a client logo under each one.

Plenty of marketing leads won't phone an agency they've only read about, and the ones who do are calling three of you the same afternoon. A form gives you the brief in writing while they're still on your work page. Ask for the company, the sector, what they're trying to shift, a budget range, when they want to start, and whether a written brief exists. Six fields and your first reply can be about their business instead of a request for more information.

The budget field is the one agencies leave off out of politeness, and it costs them weeks. A range with three or four bands is enough, and it lets you tell a retainer conversation from a one-off logo job before anyone books a call. You choose exactly which fields appear, because Yola's contact form is customizable rather than fixed, and the Forms block help article walks through setting it up. A submission is an inquiry rather than a signed scope, and Yola sends an automatic confirmation so the sender knows it landed.

Reply the next working day, and say who'll be on the call. An agency that takes a week to answer a brief has already told the client what the third month of a retainer will feel like.

An agency holds no licence, so there's no registration number to put up and nothing to certify. What you have instead is a record: how long you've been trading, who you've worked for, what the work won, and who's on the payroll. Put the two or three strongest of those on the home page rather than three clicks down in About, and repeat one beside the inquiry form.

Show only what's true today and only what you can point somebody at. A client logo needs their permission, an award needs the year and the piece of work it was for, and a membership that lapsed last year comes down. Where you'd rather not name a client, naming the sector and the size of the business does most of the same work without breaking anything.

Agencies put things in the diary that are worth a page: a talk one of your strategists is giving, a workshop you run for clients, a hiring open day, a screening of work you produced, and the awards deadlines you enter against. One page holds the lot, and each entry needs the date, the time, where it is, what it costs if anything, and how to reserve a place, which points at your inquiry form.

Yola has no events or calendar block, so this is an ordinary page somebody edits by hand. That takes two minutes an entry and there's no ticketing or RSVP behind it. Keep the past dates on the page underneath the upcoming ones, because a list of talks you actually gave is evidence somebody asked you to give them. If the page would be empty, leave it off until you have two real things to put on it.

An agency gets found two ways, and they need different work. One is the city search, where somebody wants an agency they can sit in a room with. The other is the sector search, where somebody wants an agency that already knows their category and doesn't much care which city it's in. Yola's SEO Optimized Website capability covers the technical side of your pages; the rest is Google and your own wording.

Do the city work first, because it is quicker and it feeds the sector work later. A studio address, accurate hours and a profile somebody has actually filled in will get you into local results within weeks, while a sector page needs real projects underneath it before it ranks for anything.

Before you tell anybody the site is live, go through it on a phone the way a marketing director would between meetings. Tap the phone number and check it dials. Send yourself a project inquiry and read the automatic confirmation that comes back. Open the heaviest case study and time how long the images take, because agency sites are the ones that load a 4 MB hero and lose the visit before the work appears.

Yola sites are mobile optimized and responsive, so the layout adapts on its own between phone, tablet and laptop, and every site gets an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups. Check speed on the pages that carry the work: home, the work index, each case study and contact.

After that the job is upkeep, and for an agency it is mostly the work section. A project finishes and wants writing up that month. Results land three months after launch and belong on the case study that's already published. Somebody leaves and their credit lines have to be handled properly rather than deleted. A client changes their mind about being named. Give the work page and the team page a review date and a named owner inside the agency, and make sure more than one person can log in and publish. A site that keeps moving holds its search ranking better than one left alone for a year.

Common creative agency website mistakes to avoid

The same handful of mistakes turn up on agency sites, and every one of them costs you a place on somebody's shortlist.

How much does a creative agency website cost?

On Yola the site starts free, and a paid plan is $9.95/mo when you want your own domain, more pages and more room for project images, plus the full AI tools. Annual plans include a free domain for the first year. Against a single pitch you don't win, that is nothing.

Having somebody else build it costs a good deal more. A freelancer or a small studio building a comparable site often runs from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, before anything ongoing, and a site that needs a new case study every few weeks keeps costing after launch. Agencies also have the option nobody talks about, which is putting their own team on it, and that bill arrives as the billable days you didn't sell.

The real number is what happens after launch. An agency site is only as good as its newest project, and the case study you publish the week the results come in is worth more than the one that waits for a quarterly release. Owning the site means whoever wrote the case study can publish it that afternoon, with no ticket, no queue and no change request.