What is the practical answer?
Start with the job the website has to do. A service business may need qualified inquiries. An appointment business needs a clear booking journey. Those needs give you a better basis for comparing development teams than the appearance of their own homepage alone.
Look beyond the portfolio cover image
Open the actual project. Read it on your phone, find a service and follow the route to a call, quote or booking. A case study should explain what the team built and which parts of the project it was responsible for.
Look for work that addresses a similar customer journey. The business does not need to be in the same city to provide a useful example. What matters is whether the team can explain the decisions and adapt them to your own customers.
Compare the same scope
Two website quotes can look similar while including very different work. List the pages, content responsibilities, design reviews and integrations you expect. Discuss mobile layouts, forms and the administration features your team will need.
Ask what is optional and what is required for launch. Domain renewal, hosting, booking subscriptions, payment processing and maintenance may sit outside the build fee. Keeping them visible makes the proposals easier to compare.
Make the search handover part of a redesign
Give the team access to the current page list and available search data. Useful existing URLs, content and incoming links deserve attention before pages are removed or renamed. The launch plan should include appropriate redirects, canonical URLs, a sitemap and checks for broken internal links.
Ask how the new pages will explain your services in the language customers use. A business with a genuine local service area needs accurate location information. A company serving clients remotely throughout the USA needs a clear national offer and evidence of the work.
Review working pages, including the awkward parts
Use the review period to test the actions that matter: service selection, form errors, booking links, menus, content editing and the layout on a small phone. Send specific feedback about the task you could not complete or the information you could not find.
Performance should be measured on the released pages with the agreed tools and conditions recorded. If the site connects to booking, payment or CRM services, agree which complete journeys will be tested and how test data will be handled.
Agree ownership and support before starting
Clarify who controls the domain, hosting account, source code and third-party services. Ask what access and documentation you receive at handover, and how updates are handled afterward. Your team should know whom to contact and what ongoing support covers.
For a remote project, agree a point of contact and review times in your time zone. Melos works with US businesses this way: a defined brief, shared previews, focused reviews and an agreed handover. You can start by sending your current website and the part of the experience you want to improve.