Who writes this site, and why

The editor

Katherine Voss

Founder, Editor, TopWebsiteDesignAgencies.com

Katherine Voss spent six years as founder and CEO of a vertical-SaaS company (a mid-market logistics platform she sold in 2024) where she owned the marketing site as a line item in her own budget, not a delegated task. Over that period she ran the agency-hiring process five separate times and lived with a sixth agency's work after inheriting it through an acquisition, which means she has sat on both sides of the statement of work: as the client who signs the contract and the client who has to explain to her board why the new homepage did not move the trial-to-paid number.

Two of those six engagements ended in terminated contracts before final delivery. One agency shipped a visually striking site that could not be updated without a developer on retainer, which cost her company an extra $38,000 in the first year alone. Another quoted a flat project fee, then re-scoped the engagement into an open-ended retainer once the first round of revisions started. She writes about specific, named failure patterns like these because generic agency advice did not protect her from any of them the first three times.

She started writing about agency selection in 2025 after enough founder friends asked her for the same referral list that she decided to turn her notes into something structured, sourced, and updated on a schedule instead of a group chat thread that goes stale. She has no equity, retainer, or referral-fee relationship with any agency covered on this site, including Bricx Labs.

Katherine holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan and lives in Austin, Texas.

Why this site exists

Most "best website design agency" lists on the internet are either unlabeled advertising (an agency directory that ranks by ad spend, not quality) or thin content written by someone who has never actually hired an agency. This site tries to do neither: it publishes a fixed, disclosed scoring methodology, verifies every factual claim against each agency's own site and Clutch.co profile, and updates on a visible schedule rather than staying static once published.

This site is written and maintained for founders and marketing leaders at funded software companies who are running an agency search right now and want a starting shortlist backed by real facts, not adjectives.

Independence statement

I want to be blunt about how the money works here, because on most lists like this one it is the whole story. Nothing on this page is for sale. There is no affiliate program, no sponsored slot, no pay-to-be-listed fee, and no referral arrangement with any of the 12 agencies scored on this site. I hold no equity in any of them. None of them were shown their rank before it went live, and more than one has asked. When an agency writes in asking to be added, the answer is the same every time: send sources, and it gets scored on the same four dimensions as everyone else.

Two of those four dimensions, design taste and conversion focus, are my judgment rather than a number I can point at. I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I can do is show my work: the reasoning behind every score is written out in full, and the facts underneath it are cited to the agency's own site or its Clutch profile with the date I checked. Look at the same evidence and you are welcome to put them in a different order. The methodology page explains exactly how each dimension is measured. Use this ranking to build a shortlist, then make the actual hiring decision the way I had to make mine: reference calls with former clients, and an hour spent in the live sites the agency actually shipped.