How to brief a web project so the quotes you get are actually comparable

Start with the decision, not the page list

A page list is an output, not a brief. What a studio needs first is the business decision the site has to drive: do you want more qualified enquiries, direct online sales, a credible presence that survives being googled before a meeting, or fewer support calls? Those four goals produce genuinely different structures, and the wrong one is expensive to discover after launch.

Then say who it is for and what you want them to do. "Facility managers comparing three vendors, who should request a quote" tells us more than five paragraphs about your company history. It sets the depth of proof needed, how the pricing question gets handled, and what the primary action on every page should be.

• ●One sentence on the business goal, in plain language
• ●Who the visitor is and what stage they are at when they arrive
• ●The single action you most want them to take
• ●How you will know in six months whether it worked
• ●Anything the site must not do — brand rules, claims you cannot make, competitors you will not name

The details that actually change the price

Two quotes for "a ten-page website" can differ by a wide margin without either being dishonest. The gap is almost always in these items, and if the brief is silent on them, each studio assumes something different — usually whatever makes their number look reasonable.

Content is the most common surprise. If nobody has decided who writes the text and sources the photography, the project stalls in week three and someone ends up doing it under pressure. State it in the brief even if the answer is "we do not know yet".

• ●Content: who writes copy, who supplies images, whether existing material can be reused
• ●Self-editing: do you need to update pages yourself, and which parts
• ●Integrations: booking, payments, email marketing, or the CRM you already run
• ●Languages: one language, or several with separate content and search intent per market
• ●Ecommerce: catalogue size, variants, tax and shipping rules, payment providers
• ●Existing site: are you migrating URLs and content, or starting on a clean domain

How to make three quotes comparable

Ask every studio for the same three things: scope in numbered deliverables, the assumptions the price depends on, and what is explicitly excluded. The exclusions list is the most informative document in any proposal. A quote that lists nothing as excluded has simply moved the argument to later.

Also settle ownership before signing, not after. Who owns the code, the domain, the hosting account, the analytics property and the design files? Which accounts are registered in your name? A project can be delivered perfectly and still leave you unable to change vendor, and that is a contract question, not a technical one.

• ●Numbered deliverables, not adjectives
• ●Assumptions the price depends on, in writing
• ●What is excluded, and what it would cost if added later
• ●Who owns code, domain, hosting, analytics and design files
• ●What happens after launch: fixes, updates, hosting, and who is responsible for what
• ●How change requests are priced once the build has started

What we would rather you tell us up front

A budget range is not a weakness to hide. Without it, we either propose the ambitious version and waste your time, or the minimal version and lose the project for the wrong reason. A range lets us tell you honestly whether it is achievable, what we would cut first, and whether you would be better served by a smaller build now and a second phase later.

Say the same about deadlines and decision-makers. A fixed event date changes the plan; three people with veto power changes the review process. We work remotely across time zones in English, Hebrew and Spanish, so distributed teams are normal for us — but only if we know who signs off on what before the first draft goes out.

Frequently asked questions