I saw this post on Launchpad Advertising’s excellent blog, and I left a comment. I thought I’d share it with you guys because in my job search, I’ve been looking at a lot of agency websites.

I feel like you can take agency websites and put them into five categories:

a) The Flash monster. Many shops that pride themselves on their creativity feel like they must have a flash intro that looks like it was designed by Dali playing with an 8-bit color scheme. It certainly makes the point that they’re creative, but it also says out loud the underlying suffix “but we might be creative at the cost of other things.”

b) The Empire Builder. Hi! Want to send us an email? Choose from any of our fifty billion offices. We won’t say which office does which account, and we won’t let you send it to a central address for one of our people to forward it to the right place. If you want to do anything at all, you’ll have to pick an office by continent, country, state. Leo Burnett manages to combine this with a).

c) The Overly Social. I absolutely love Twitter, but the overly social agency site will take the idea of spreadable media a bit too far. Right on their intro page they’ll have a YouTube playlist that plays automatically and without permission, a constantly-updated Twitter feed that’s scrolling faster than you can read something that’s in your periphery, and maybe the bandcamp page of the hip hop band from creative. I’m a big fan of sites that do social well, and there are many of those. But the Overly Social is a stranger who hugs you at a bar.

d) The Barely There. Of all the ways an agency site can go wrong, I feel like this is the most forgivable. If a potential client is looking at an agency’s website, then she or he must be acquainted with the process and work already. I don’t think that the website is the first or main or only thing a client looks at in choosing to contact an agency. For small agencies, this is doubly true. And a minimally informative website means that the people are too busy doing actual work. But I’m admittedly biased–I’ve seen several agencies with fantastic work and minimal websites.

e) The Perfection. Blogs and Twitter feeds are easy to find but unobtrusive at the same time. There’s no Flash except in showcasing interactive work, which actually animates. The agency is willing, or even better, eager to discuss how they are dedicated to creating long-term growth over, say, bragging about their Klout score. The layout is clear and web 2.0 without being blocky. The color scheme isn’t dull but doesn’t hurt your eyes. Ahhh. So beautiful.