Agile
In brief
Agile is a catch-all term for a family of project methodologies.
When a company really practices an Agile methodology, you should expect the following:
- Short release cycles. It's bad form to beaver away for months without keeping you in the loop.
- Talk of 'live' rather than 'demoable'. Agile developers want to produce real business value at the end of a release cycle.
- To be asked to keep your ideas for improvements in a 'backlog' while a release cycle is in progress.
- For all members of a particular team to understand to some degree what the other team members are doing.
A common misperception
'Agile' does not mean entirely flexible. An Agile development team will not bend to your every command, but will ask for and expect your input at regular intervals.
If you would rather someone else dealt with all things web, assign someone to be the 'product owner' and give them the authority to make live releases. There's nothing worse than an otherwise disinterested business owner kicking up a fuss about features of a website when he hasn't paid any attention to its development.
Someone else has said it better
See the following sites for explanations of specific Agile methodologies.