Ask three studios to quote for the same website and you get three documents that look comparable and are not. One has a single line and a total. Another has fourteen lines. The third has a round number and the word "turnkey".
The instinct is to compare the totals, and that is where the decision goes wrong. A website quote is not a price with a description sitting on top of it: it is the definition of the work.
Whatever is not written inside it takes one of three routes. It does not get done. It gets done and billed separately. Or it ends up on your own desk on a Sunday evening, almost always as text that needs writing.
This article is about the structure of a quote, not about amounts. What follows are the lines a serious quote names, and the three that tend to be missing. Read them with the quote you received open beside you.
Pages counted by name, not "a corporate website"
The quote should say how many pages the site has and which ones they are, by name. "A corporate website" is not a quantity. "Home, About, four service pages, Team, Contact" is: that is eight, and the two documents in front of you are finally describing the same thing.
The number itself says less than it seems. A site of eight properly written pages and a site of thirty pages generated from a template cost different amounts of effort and are worth different things, and that is a separate argument we have already made. What matters here is that the number is written down.
If the site carries features, each one gets a line of its own: appointment booking, a contact form, a client area, a shop, a map, a connection to a system you already use. These are what make the effort vary, and these are the ones that most often come up in the conversation and never reach the document.
Who writes the text: silence picks the client
This is the line that goes missing most often and the one that causes the most delay. A website typically holds between one thousand and four thousand words. Somebody has to write them.
There are three legitimate answers, and all three work:
- the studio writes them;
- the client writes them;
- the client writes them, onto a structure the studio supplies.
What does not work is a quote that never says which one it is. When it doesn’t, the practical answer always turns out to be the second, discovered three weeks after the work has started, with no date attached and nobody waiting for it.
Images: the source has a cost, and so does the handling
New photography, a stock library, illustration, or the photographs the company already has. Each option has a different cost and a different result, and the difference between them shows more than any other decision on the project.
The quote should also say who handles the images once they are chosen: cropping, compression, modern formats, versions made for a phone. A photograph uploaded exactly as it came out of the camera, several megabytes of it, is the single most common cause of a slow website.
Ownership: "the site is yours" cannot be verified
It should be written, in plain language, who ends up owning the domain, the code and the accounts the site lives in. The right answer is always the same: the client. "The site is yours" is not enough, because it asserts nothing anyone can check.
What can be checked is this:
- the domain is registered in your company’s name;
- the code is handed over;
- the hosting and registrar accounts are in your name, with your recovery email address.
If the quote does not say so, ask, and ask for the answer in writing. How to confirm today who owns your website is a whole article on its own, and we wrote one.
Hosting and the domain are not paid for once
They are recurring costs: they come round again long after the site has been delivered. The quote should say who pays them in the first year, how long that first year lasts, and what happens at renewal: who gets the notice, who starts paying, and to whom.
The practical question is where that notice goes. If it goes to the mailbox of whoever built the site, that is where it will sit in the year that person no longer works with you.
Maintenance is a different thing and deserves a line of its own: updates, backups, fixes, small changes. It can be included, it can be a retainer, it can simply not exist. All three are defensible. The absence of any mention is not.
The deadline: a date, and the list of what moves it
A date, in writing. And next to it, an honest list of what pushes it back: text that has not arrived, photographs that have not arrived, a decision only the client can take.
A deadline without that second part is a deadline that will be missed and then argued about. A deadline with it is an agreement between two parties who know what each of them has to deliver, and on what day.
After delivery: who fixes things, and for how long
Training, or none. A manual, or none. A period in which mistakes are put right at no cost, and how long that period lasts. How you ask for a change after that, and how it is billed: by the hour, on a retainer, or as a new quote.
It is worth having the payment schedule written down here too: how many instalments, at which moments, and against what. That is not distrust; it is the only way two people end up with the same idea of what has already been delivered.
Personal data: somebody has to own the obligations
A contact form collects personal data, and that brings obligations. A company selling to consumers has information it is required to show on the site. Somebody has to take care of it.
The quote should say who: the studio, a lawyer on the client’s side, or nobody. "Nobody" is also an answer, as long as it is written down and the client has read it.
The three lines that are almost always missing
Ownership of the domain. Rarely out of bad faith: it is quicker to register the domain in the studio’s own account than to open one in the client’s name. Quick on day one, expensive on the day you want to change supplier.
Who writes the text. This is the line that turns "three weeks" into "three months", and neither side quite works out how it happened.
What happens two years from now. A site built on a system with dozens of extensions needs regular updates so that it neither decays nor sits exposed. A site in custom code has no such calendar. Neither choice is wrong, but the difference shows up in next year’s budget, and the year-zero quote almost never mentions it.
One question at the end solves half of this
Once you have read a quote from beginning to end, ask the person who wrote it a single question: what is not in here?
People who work well answer quickly, and with a list. People who dislike the question have just handed you the most useful piece of information in the meeting.
How we quote: everything in writing, before we start
With the pages counted by name, the author of the text identified, the images defined, the domain in the client’s name and a delivery date. It is not a virtue: it is the only way a quote means anything on the day it gets compared with the work that was done.
If you have a quote in front of you and want an honest reading of what is in it and what is missing, book a 15 minute call. It does not have to be us you build with.
Sources
This article cites no third-party data: it is about the structure of a commercial document and argues from building practice. No number here comes from a study the reader cannot check.