Evaluating a Consulting company based on their website

Here are some rules for evaluating IT consulting companies based on their website. The idea is to give the work to the supplier who has the highest score at the end of this process:

• Start each company with a score of 100.
  
  
• Subtract 1 for every meaningless (ie unprovable) adjective on their website - look for words like "passionate", "committed" and "highly skilled".
  
  
• Subtract 5 for every graphic on their website depicting a person who doesn't work for their company.
  
  
• Subtract 10 for every client reference on their website where the consultant(s) who did the work are no longer employed at that company. If possible, use Linked-In etc to track down where those top-gun consultants are currently working and include their new employers on your list of potential suppliers.
  
  
• Subtract 20 if their website lists a technology (eg Lotus Domino) without identifying a specialized skill set within that technology (eg System Admin v. Application Development v. integration with SAP v. software upgrades)
  
  
• Subtract 50 if the staff they want to assign to your project don't have current technical certifications in any of the technologies listed on their website.
  
  
• Automatically disqualify any supplier who outsources the care and feeding of their own website to another IT company.
  

Then pick the three companies with the highest score and mention to each of them that you're going to run your shortlist past the Vendor and ask for a recommendation. If any of them offer you a free lunch or other bribe at that point then take it and subtract 10 from their score.

... or you can just pick the supplier who gives you the cheapest quote. That seems to be the way most customers work.
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