How to write a brief a vendor can actually quote against

Most website briefs are a paragraph saying the site looks old and we want something modern. Three vendors then quote for three different pieces of work and none of the numbers can be compared.

Two pages fixes this. Here is what goes in them.

One: what the business does, in four sentences

What you make or provide, who buys it, where they are, and what makes you different in a way a buyer would recognise. Not your mission. Four factual sentences.

If you cannot write these four sentences, that is the finding. Everything downstream depends on them.

Two: who the site is for, specifically

Name the buyer types. A sourcing engineer at an OEM. A procurement officer at a hospital. A dealer reordering spares. An export buying house checking compliance.

For each one, what they need to see before they will contact you. This single section removes most of the guesswork that makes quotes diverge, and it is drawn from real behaviour rather than assumption, as covered in how Indian B2B buyers actually behave.

Three: what is currently wrong, with numbers

Not the site looks dated. Measured facts. Home page weighs 8.4 MB. Takes about eleven seconds on 4G. Six pages indexed against two hundred products. The form has not delivered since March. Run the checks in the technical checklist and paste the results.

A vendor who reads this quotes for the real problem. A vendor who reads it looks fast and modern quotes for a redesign.

Four: scope, as a number

How many product or service pages. How many company pages. Whether the full range is included, which is the single largest cost line and the one most often left ambiguous on purpose.

Say explicitly who writes the words and who supplies photographs. If the quote says content to be provided by client, that work has not been priced and it still has to happen.

Five: the performance target

State it. Under 900 KB above the fold. LCP under 2.5 seconds on a 4G connection. Passing Core Web Vitals on mobile, verifiable by anybody at PageSpeed Insights.

This is the most useful sentence in the whole brief. It converts fast loading from an adjective into something you can hold somebody to.

Six: what must not break

• Every existing URL redirected, so the search position you have is not lost.
• The current site stays live until switchover, scheduled outside working hours.
• Existing enquiry routing keeps working, and gets tested before launch.
• Analytics history preserved, because it cannot be recovered later.

Seven: ownership, stated up front

Domain registered in your company name. Hosting account in your name. Analytics and Search Console in your name. Files and a handover document at the end.

Verify the domain part yourself at ICANN Lookup, and for .in domains through NIXI. A third of the companies we audit do not control their own domain and every one found out at a bad moment. Detail in domain and hosting.

Eight: budget range and timeline

Give a range. Vendors will tell you it cannot be quoted without one, and they are right. A range stops you receiving a six lakh proposal when you had one lakh, which wastes everybody a fortnight.

The bands we see in the Indian market are set out in what a website should cost in India. Then ask every vendor the same fourteen questions from the vendor questions piece and compare the answers rather than the totals.

What to leave out

Design direction, mostly. Saying make it look like this competitor buys you a copy of somebody else’s compromises. Describe the feeling you want and the buyer you want to convince, then let whoever you hire solve it.

Also leave out the technology. Unless you have a genuine constraint, specifying WordPress or React in a brief is choosing a means before agreeing the end. Let the vendor justify their choice against your performance target.

What good responses look like

Specific, not reassuring. A vendor who says we normally land around 1.1 megabytes and here is how you verify it knows their work. One who says we always optimise for performance is saying nothing.

Watch for what they ask you. A vendor who comes back with questions about your product data has understood where the work actually is. One who comes back with a price the same afternoon has not read the brief.

Written by Sameer Gaikwad, founder of Buildgin. Thirty three years in electrical power systems across global MNCs, now applying the same condition monitoring habit to websites.