Most website projects go wrong before a line of code is written, in a brief nobody wrote down and a budget that stopped at launch. This starts differently.
It isn’t that the quotes are wrong. It’s that nothing lets you compare them.
Quotes for what sounds like a single brief routinely arrive many times apart, and every one of them can be entirely honest. They’re describing different things, and nothing in any of the documents tells you which one your business actually needs.
That gap isn’t padding. It’s a set of decisions nobody has walked you through.
The job the site actually has to do, for whom, and what happens when it works. Everything else follows from this.
What one new customer is worth, how many the site needs to bring in, and how the budget should split between building it and getting people to it.
Hosting, maintenance, updates and support: the annual figure that rarely appears in a build quote.
Template, off-the-shelf, or built from scratch. Decided on where the business is going, not on what’s fashionable.
A written brief every supplier can quote against on the same terms, so the numbers that come back are comparable.
Who writes the words and takes the pictures, and when. The most common reason a build runs months late.
Search, paid, or neither, decided before launch rather than after it.
Tracking specified up front, so you can tell from the first week whether any of it is working.
Domain, hosting, code and accounts in your name before work starts, not renegotiated afterwards.
Written sign-off criteria, so finishing isn’t a matter of opinion and neither is the final invoice.
How a project runs.
The brief, the budget split between build and traffic, and a fixed price against a written specification. No surprises later because nothing was assumed.
Structure and layout agreed before anything is styled. You see and approve the shape of it before the detail work starts.
WordPress, Shopify or custom, whichever the specification called for. Built to be edited by you afterwards, not to require me.
Tracking live from day one, a handover you can actually use, and a clear figure for what it costs to run.