Seven questions before commissioning a site

The difference between website quotes usually isn't price — it's how much of the scope each one settled. When two quotes for the same job differ threefold, one of them has usually included things you didn't think to ask about.

Here are seven questions worth settling before you ask anyone for a number. You don't need to know every answer; knowing which ones you don't know is enough.

1. What is this site actually meant to do?

"Corporate website" covers too much ground. What is the one thing you want a visitor to do — fill in a form, call, download a catalogue, buy something?

Projects that can't answer this fall apart at the design stage. Everything gets put on every page and nothing stands out.

2. Who is writing the content?

This is where projects stall most often. Design finishes, development finishes, and the site sits unpublished for months waiting on copy.

Are you writing it or is the agency? If the agency, where does the industry knowledge come from? Where do photographs come from? If this isn't discussed at quote stage, it comes back as extra cost later.

3. Who updates it afterwards?

Do you want to email the agency every time a heading needs changing?

If not, you need an admin area, and it has to be in scope. List which parts should be editable up front — "everything should be editable" is an expensive and usually unnecessary requirement.

4. Is an existing site being migrated?

If you already have a site and search traffic, every old URL has to be permanently redirected to its new address. Skip this and you can lose years of accumulated ranking in a day.

It isn't technically hard, but it is very easy to forget. If the quote doesn't mention redirects or a URL map, ask.

5. How many languages?

Building a bilingual site from the start is quite different from adding a second language later. Retrofitting usually means rebuilding the page structure.

If a second language is anywhere on the horizon, say so on day one.

6. Who owns it?

Whose name is the domain registered in? Who owns the hosting account? Can you access the source code?

All three should be yours. The hardest situations we see when a client changes agencies come from one of these sitting in someone else's account.

7. What happens after launch?

The site goes live. If something breaks, who fixes it? Who is responsible for security updates? Who pays for hosting?

A maintenance contract doesn't have to be mandatory, but "what happens after launch" shouldn't be left undefined.

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Once these seven are settled, the quotes you get become comparable. Often what emerges is that the cheaper-looking quote simply contained less work.

If you'd like to talk a project through, get in touch — we work out the scope together on the first call.