Development
Hire the Firm That Answers in Year Five
The portfolio is the wrong question.
Every institution screens web development firms the same way: review the portfolio, call the references, compare the proposals. It is a reasonable process with one structural flaw. The portfolio shows the work at its shiniest — launch week, full attention, every stakeholder leaning in. It shows nothing about month fourteen, when the homepage carousel breaks at 2 a.m. before a board presentation and someone has to pick up the phone.
The portfolio ages. The relationship does not — or it shouldn't. Firms know this, which is why the sales deck leads with logos and the support model is buried in the contract appendix. The buyer's job is to find the appendix before signing.
The portfolio shows the work at its shiniest — launch week, full attention, every stakeholder leaning in. It shows nothing about month fourteen.
After launch, the site still has to work.
WordPress core updates. Plugin conflicts. A broken form that nobody noticed for three weeks. A staff editor who needs a real answer, not a ticket queue. These are not glamorous problems, and they do not appear in any portfolio. They are, however, the entire job description for the second through seventh years of a site's life — which is to say, most of it.
The firms that handle this well tend to build for it from the start. They choose a platform architecture that their own team can support without archaeology, document the decisions that will be mysterious in eighteen months, and staff a maintenance relationship that has a named human on it. The firms that handle it badly launch beautiful sites and then get expensive when something breaks.
The difference is not visible in the portfolio. It is visible in what happens when you call the old client two years after their launch date and ask how things are going.
Ask who answers in year five.
Every firm looks like the right answer at proposal time. The screen that actually separates them is the one institutions almost never run: call a client whose site launched three years ago and ask whether the firm still picks up.
The questions that reveal the real firm.
Ask for references from clients whose sites are at least two years old, not from the most recent launch. Ask those clients specifically whether the firm is reachable — not whether the work was good at delivery. Ask how long it takes to get a response when something breaks on a Friday. Ask whether the same people who built the site are still involved, or whether the relationship was handed off to a junior account coordinator the day the invoice cleared.
Then look at the firm's own ongoing service model. Is maintenance a named product with defined scope, or is it a vague promise of availability? A firm that has thought seriously about the post-launch years will have structured an answer. A firm that is primarily in the business of launching sites will not. That gap tells you exactly what you are buying.
We have been building and maintaining institutional sites for over two decades. The clients we are proudest of are not the ones with the most visible launches — they are the ones who called us in year five with a problem, and got a real answer from someone who already knew their site. That is the relationship worth buying. The portfolio just tells you we can build; the maintenance record tells you we stay.