Custom code as default. A marketing site becomes a React project because the team knows React. Three months and a CMS integration later, you have a site that gets updated twice a year and requires a deploy for every change. We've migrated these to Webflow. The clients wish they'd started there.

Pretty but fragile. Gorgeous design, no underlying system. Duplicate styles everywhere. No CMS collections, just static pages. Looks great in the portfolio, becomes a nightmare when you need to add a seventh product or change the footer across forty pages.

Animations as proof of skill. Scroll effects on everything. Parallax because parallax exists. The site loads slowly, performs worse on mobile, and the motion competes with the content it's supposed to support.

The orphaned handoff. Agency delivers, client accepts, nobody writes down how anything works. Marketing is afraid to touch it. Every small change becomes a support ticket. The site that was supposed to give you independence makes you more dependent than before.