How to choose a web or creative agency in Monaco: a checklist

Agency pitches tend to look alike: a showreel, a grid of projects, a confident deck. The differences show up later, when your team has to update the site in two languages, when a visitor asks what happened to their data, or when you change provider and need your files back. These are the questions we would ask from your side of the table. The list ranks no one, us included, and you can check most of it before you sign.

The work they actually built

Ask for links to live sites, then ask what the agency did on each one: the design, the code, the photography, the copy, or only part of it. Agencies may fairly show work they contributed to, as long as they name their part. Open two or three of those sites on your own phone, go past the home page, and switch language if there is a second one. Ask to meet the people who will work on your project, not only the person who presents it.

Who builds the site, and who owns it at the end

Ask who designs, who writes the code and whether any of it goes to a subcontractor. Subcontracting is common; what matters is knowing who holds the work and who answers when something breaks.

Then put ownership in writing before the project starts:

• the domain name, registered in your company’s name;
• the hosting and CMS accounts, with an administrator login in your hands;
• the source code, or at least the right to take it to another provider;
• design files, fonts and image licences;
• photographs and films, and how you may use them once the campaign is over.

The test is simple: if the agency stopped answering tomorrow, could another team take over the site without starting again?

Two languages, each written for its readers

If your clients read French and English, ask who writes each version. A page run through a translation tool reads like one, and a French reader notices the register and the typography at once.

The structure matters as much as the words. Google decides a page’s language from its visible text, and recommends a separate URL for each language version and a single language for the content and navigation of each page. On this site, the French pages live under /fr/ with French addresses, such as /fr/agence-web/, and every page links to its translation.

Search basics you can check yourself

On a live site the agency built, look for real text rather than words set inside images, one page per service with its own title and description, and headings in a logical order. Language versions should be joined with hreflang annotations: Google says each language version must list itself and all the others, and ignores the tags when two pages do not point to each other.

Be wary of any promised position in the results. Google itself puts it plainly: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”

Accessibility

An accessible site works with a keyboard alone, with a screen reader, and for people who turn motion down. The reference is WCAG 2.2, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (a W3C Recommendation dated 12 December 2024), which sets three levels of conformance: A, AA and AAA. Ask which level the agency builds to, how it tests, and whether it will write an accessibility statement for your site. Ours sets out the standard we aim for, what we have done and the limits we know about.

Speed on a phone

Google uses the mobile version of a site’s content for indexing and ranking, so the phone version is the one that counts. Ask the agency to open a recent project on a phone, on mobile data, in front of you, then to run it through PageSpeed Insights, Google’s tool that reports on the user experience of a page on mobile and desktop. Heavy films, oversized photographs and too many third-party scripts are the usual reasons a page is slow. Ask how the agency deals with each.

Personal data and Law No. 1.565

Monaco’s data protection law is Law No. 1.565 of 3 December 2024, published in the Journal de Monaco on 13 December 2024. A contact form, a newsletter sign-up and visitor statistics can all involve personal data, so the agency you choose plays a part in how your site handles it. Four articles bear on that choice:

• Article 26. When a provider processes personal data on your behalf, the processing is governed by a written contract, and the provider acts only on your documented instructions. If the agency will host your site or receive your form submissions, ask for that contract.
• Article 23. Data protection is required from the design stage and, by default, only the data each purpose needs is processed. Ask which trackers and outside tools the agency plans to install, and why.
• Article 87. Access to personal data stored on a visitor’s device (the mechanism cookies rely on) must be preceded by clear and complete information on its purpose and on how to object. The site cannot make access depend on the visitor’s acceptance, with exceptions such as storage strictly necessary for a service the visitor has expressly requested.
• Article 97. Personal data may go abroad when the destination offers an adequate level of protection. EU member states are deemed to offer it; for other countries, the list is published in the Journal de Monaco and on the website of the APDP, Monaco’s data protection authority. Ask where the site, the forms and the email are hosted.

This is a checklist, not legal advice. For your own obligations, start with the APDP’s page for professionals, and check with your lawyer.

How AI is used, and labelled

Ask where the agency uses generative AI: images, film, copy, code. What matters is that you are told, that the contract says what you may do with what is delivered, and that no real person’s likeness is generated without their consent.

Ask too how pictures mixing photography and AI will be labelled, and whether the original files keep a record. The C2PA coalition provides an open technical standard for establishing where a piece of content came from and how it was changed; its records are called Content Credentials. On our Engel & Völkers Genova project, we finished two pictures of a terrace with Adobe Firefly: the original files carry Content Credentials that record it, and both pictures are labelled.

Approvals, handover and training

Ask how approvals work before you need them. Who signs off on each side? How many rounds of changes are included at each stage? Do you review the work on a private link to the site in progress, or on still images? What happens to a change requested after sign-off?

Then the handover. Ask what your team will be able to change alone (text, pictures, new pages) and whether training is part of the project. For ITAL Brokers in Genoa, we built the site on a CMS that the firm’s marketing office could run after launch, and trained that team to update it; the site is now in their hands. Finally, ask who applies updates and keeps backups after launch, and who to call.

The short version

Questions to bring to the first meeting:

• Which parts of these projects did you do yourselves?
• Who will build our site, and what will we own at the end?
• Who writes each language?
• Which accessibility level do you build to?
• Can you show us one of your sites on a phone, now?
• Will you process personal data for us, and under what contract?
• Where do you use AI, and how is it labelled?
• What will our team be able to change alone?

Several of our own answers are on our web design page.