Three proposals arrive, and on paper they look interchangeable.
Each promises a modern investor relations website, a content management system the team can operate, responsive design, and a launch in roughly ten weeks. The portfolios are attractive. The pricing varies, but not by enough to settle anything. Everyone on the shortlist seems capable of building a good-looking site.
The differences that actually matter rarely appear in a proposal. They appear eleven months later, on a morning when a news release has to be on the website before the market opens, the homepage needs a same-day change, and the question of who picks up the phone suddenly becomes very concrete.
Choosing an IR website partner is less about who can build the site and more about who will stand behind it once it is live. The build takes a few months. The relationship, if it works, lasts years and covers earnings cycles, financings, management changes, and at least one day when everything is urgent at once. The questions below are designed around that reality, and they apply to any vendor you might consider — including us.
The three realistic options, and what each one trades away
Most public companies choosing a vendor for an investor-facing website are choosing between three broad models. Each can work. Each fails in a characteristic way.
The generalist agency or freelancer
Design agencies and independent developers are often genuinely talented, competitively priced, and pleasant to work with. If your internal team has strong IR operations knowledge and mainly needs build capacity, a good generalist can deliver a solid site.
The trade-off is that they learn public-company requirements on your budget. A generalist has usually never published a material news release under time pressure, never managed a document archive that analysts read as a record, and never considered why a quarterly report page needs a different structure than a product page. Their post-launch support is typically a retainer model built for marketing sites: a monthly allotment of hours, turnaround measured in days, and no concept of pre-market timing. None of this makes them bad vendors. It means the burden of specifying, checking, and scheduling everything correctly stays with your team, permanently.
The IR platform vendor
At the other end are the large vendors that bundle websites with webcasting, stock-quote feeds, earnings tools, and distribution services. Their strengths are real: reliable hosting, familiarity with disclosure-driven publishing, integrated market data, and processes built for listed companies.
The trade-offs are structural. Sites tend to be template-driven, which keeps costs predictable but can make your company look like every other issuer on the platform. Custom work moves slowly and is priced accordingly. Support usually runs through a ticket queue rather than a person who knows your site. And contracts often bundle services you may not need, with the website priced attractively because the bundle is where the margin lives. For companies that value standardization and integrated tooling over distinctiveness and speed, this can genuinely be the right answer. It is worth being honest with yourself about whether that describes your situation.
The specialist practice
Between the two sit smaller firms that focus specifically on investor relations and corporate websites. They tend to know the sector, move quickly, and give you direct access to the people doing the work rather than an account layer.
Their trade-offs deserve equal scrutiny. Small teams have capacity limits and key-person risk; if the practice has three people and one leaves, you will feel it. They rarely provide everything a platform vendor bundles, so you may still need separate providers for webcasting or wire distribution. And the category is easy to claim — plenty of generalist agencies relabel themselves as IR specialists after one public-company project. Corvize operates in this category, which is exactly why the questions in the next section matter: a claimed specialization should survive detailed questioning, whoever is claiming it.
The questions that separate one IR website partner from another
A portfolio tells you about design taste. A pitch tells you about the sales process. The questions below tell you what working with the vendor will actually be like. Ask them of every finalist and pay attention to how specific the answers are, not just what they promise.
Who does the work after launch?
The people in the pitch meeting are often not the people who will make your updates in month eight. Ask directly: when we send a change request next year, who receives it? A named person who knows our site, a pooled queue, or a subcontractor? How many other clients does that person support? Turnover happens everywhere; what matters is whether knowledge of your site lives with one individual or is documented well enough to survive a departure.
What happens on the day of a major announcement?
Walk them through a concrete scenario. A release crosses the wire at 6:30 a.m., before the open. The website version must go live at the same time, the homepage needs updating, and a webcast link changes at 6:50. Who is working at that hour? What is the escalation path if something breaks? A vendor that has actually done this will describe specific steps — staging, timing, who checks what, how corrections are handled. A vendor that has not will talk about priority support tiers.
How are updates requested, and who checks them before they go live?
Is there a defined intake channel, or does everything run through one person’s inbox? After a change is made, does anyone verify it on mobile, click the links, and check the dates — or is the client the QA process? Ask what happens when an update to one page quietly breaks another. The answer reveals whether the vendor has a publishing discipline or just a publishing capability.
What does the CMS handoff look like?
Some teams want to publish routine updates themselves; others want everything managed. Both models work when chosen deliberately. What you want to avoid is a CMS that is technically handed over but practically unusable — no training, no documentation, templates that break when edited. Ask to see the editing interface for a news release and a document upload, and ask who at the vendor will train your team and answer questions in month three.
Who owns the site, the content, and the accounts?
Get specific: domain registration, hosting account, CMS licenses, analytics properties, source files. If the site runs on the vendor’s proprietary platform, ask what leaving looks like. What do you receive on exit, in what format, at what cost, and on what timeline? A vendor with a clean answer has thought about the end of the relationship as well as the beginning. A vendor that gets vague here is telling you something.
How will the migration and redirects be handled?
Your current URLs are indexed by search engines and linked from years of news releases, filings, and third-party coverage. A rebuild that ignores this quietly severs all of it. Ask whether the vendor prepares a redirect map, how the document archive will be preserved, and how they confirm nothing important returns a dead page after launch. A vendor that shrugs at redirects is planning to discard an asset you spent years accumulating.
What is the real response time when the market is moving?
Not the service-level agreement in the contract — the practical answer. If trading in your stock is halted pending news at 11 a.m., what is the channel, and who answers it? Within what time frame can an urgent page go live? Vendors serving mostly non-listed clients often cannot answer this because the situation has never arisen for them.
Red flags worth taking seriously
Some warning signs are visible before you ask a single question:
- a portfolio dominated by restaurants, gyms, and local services, with no listed-company work
- no reference available from a public company of roughly your size
- a scope of work that says “website design and development” and little else
- “unlimited revisions” as a selling point — usually a sign that nobody has defined what the process actually is
- hosting or platform arrangements with no articulated exit path
- promises about investor attention, engagement outcomes, or market results — a website vendor cannot deliver those, and a vendor willing to promise them will present your company with the same looseness
None of these alone is disqualifying. The freelancer with the gym-heavy portfolio may be excellent, and a small first engagement can prove it. But each flag should prompt a question, and the pattern of answers is the real information.
Running a short evaluation that tells you something
Reference calls are usually wasted on questions like “were you happy with the work?” Almost everyone says yes. Ask about operations instead. Tell me about the last time you needed a same-day change — what happened? Has a release ever gone out with an error, and how was it corrected? Who do you deal with day to day, and has that changed since you signed? What surprised you after launch? Ten minutes of that yields more than any case study.
The other reliable method is a small paid first project before committing to a full rebuild: a financing landing page, a website review, a single section rebuilt. You will see how the vendor scopes, how they communicate mid-project, whether they meet their own dates, and what their QA looks like — all at a fraction of the cost of discovering it during a migration. A capable vendor rarely objects to starting small. Reluctance to do so is itself an answer.
The questions to ask yourself before you ask any vendor
Vendor evaluation goes better when you know what you are actually buying support for.
Start with update volume. A company that reports quarterly and issues occasional news needs a very different arrangement than a mining or biotech issuer publishing several releases a month. Be honest about frequency, because it determines whether you need a builder or an operating partner.
Then internal capability. Who on your team will publish content, and do they want to? If the honest answer is that nobody has the time or inclination, a beautiful CMS handoff solves nothing, and a managed arrangement is worth the cost. If your team is capable and prefers control, heavy management fees buy you friction.
Finally, the calendar. What is coming in the next twelve months — a reporting cycle, a financing, a possible uplisting, a rebrand? A vendor engaged only to launch a site will be poorly positioned for the event that arrives four months later. If you know something is coming, say so during evaluation and watch how each vendor responds. The ones who ask follow-up questions about the event are the ones thinking about the relationship rather than the launch.
A decision that should survive contact with a bad day
Any of the three vendor models can serve a public company well. The generalist works when your team supplies the IR judgment. The platform works when standardization and bundled tooling matter more than distinctiveness. The specialist works when you want sector knowledge and direct access, and have verified that the specialization is real.
What separates a good choice from a regretted one is rarely the launch. It is the ordinary Tuesday when something urgent lands and the arrangement either holds or does not. The questions in this article exist so that you learn how a vendor behaves under pressure before you are depending on it, rather than after.
Corvize works as a specialist IR website partner for public companies, and would expect to answer every question above in detail before being hired — as should anyone else on your shortlist.
