Forrester Names Best Web Design Firm, Considers Only Seventeen
In a recent study, Forrester Research named Critical Mass the best web design firm. Not that there's anything wrong with Critical Mass but Forrester deemed the pool from which this winner would be chosen to be 17. Yes, out of the hundreds of web design firms in the country, just 17 were deemed worthy of consideration. While we understand it's impossible to examine every firm in the country, for the sake of research, we hope this group of 17 was culled from a larger pool.
Comments
Wonder what the criteria was for picking this?
One lies and the other swears to it. The french word for warning is advertisment. Makes you wonder. On the other hand I have seen signs at many different restaurants claiming to have the worlds best cup of coffee. (have they tried everyone elses) Or the Miss Universe Pagent. (what other worlds have participated and how come earth contestants always win) Go figure.
Digichex
Rick Zeien
Founding Member
well, the initial pool of 17 is probably strongly correlated with the number of interactive agencies that purchase Forrester's overpriced (and overblown) reports... Forrester is pretty notorious for this- check out some of the crap the spewed out during the dotCom heyday.
I love tracking the differences in business from the last century compared to now. It used to be these kinds of awards and lists were to what most people aspired. As the previous commenters have noted, there is no such thing as "best" and if there were, I think a much larger sample size would be required to have any sort of scientific validity. I haven't read the report, so I don't know if they disclaimed their selection and/or measurement methods or not, but those would seem to be relevant to the discussion.
In my world, it is not about some pretend objective criteria but about real, measurable subjective criteria. Not every firm and client make a match made in heaven. I hope we all have clients who think we're "the best" for them — which is all that really matters IMO.
Full disclosure: I collaborate with one of the best web developers around and am rapidly becoming a web snob (pro?). Further, I think Forrester does some good analysis work and used them extensively back when I had the big bucks budget in my Corporate America days. (And, we've got to cut them a little slack - pretty much everybody went off the rails a bit back in the dot com days...)
Granted, the Critucal Mass site has a nice clean look and easy nav. Case studies are good sales tools and they certainly have an impressive client list. However, that said, three things hit me as a first-time vistor to their site. 1. Marketing speak. "solutions" bla-blah-blahhhh...zzzzz...perhaps this is comfortable for their mondo-big company target audience, but these days it's all about building personal relationships - regardless of what we sell. Which brings me to: 2. I get absolutely no feel of the people behind the company. The site text is nice, safe, generic marketing speak for the most part. 3. I got "image loading" on every page - and yet no image ever showed up. All of which tells me they may be great designers - but developers are a whole 'nuther skill set.
So, yes, I too would like to see the criteria.
I also wonder what criteria they used... Our firm is not very large and we do not clain to be the best in the USA, however, I can confidently say that we produce top quality sites. I wish we knew the criteria, perhaps, there's something for us to work on...
Thanks for sharing this info post with us.