How to write a good website tender

Before listing pages, functions or technical requirements, explain why the project is happening.

Your current website may be difficult to navigate, no longer reflect your organisation or be expensive to maintain. You may have a new strategy, a changing audience or services that people struggle to find.

Try to describe the underlying problem rather than jumping immediately to a solution.

For example:

‘Our current website has grown organically over several years. Users find it difficult to identify the right service, and our team struggles to maintain inconsistent and duplicated content. We need a website that makes our support easier to find and gives staff a more manageable publishing system.’

This gives agencies far more useful information than simply saying that you need a modern new website.

A good tender should define the change you want the project to create.

Your objectives might include:

• Helping people find support more quickly.
• Increasing donations, registrations or referrals.
• Making content easier for staff to manage.
• Improving accessibility and inclusion.
• Reducing duplicated or outdated information.
• Creating clearer journeys for different audiences.
• Giving the organisation a more credible and consistent digital presence.

Where possible, explain how you will measure success. This could include user testing, task completion rates, engagement, conversions, search performance or feedback from staff and service users.

Avoid describing your audience as “the general public”. Most websites need to serve several groups with different needs, motivations and levels of knowledge.

Identify your priority audiences and explain what each group is trying to do. A website for a charity might need to support people seeking help, professionals making referrals, donors, volunteers, campaigners and researchers.

You do not need to have completed detailed audience research before issuing the tender. It is useful to be honest about what you know, what you assume and what still needs to be explored.

Explain which services you expect the appointed partner to provide. This might include:

• Research and discovery.
• User experience and information architecture.
• Content strategy or copywriting.
• Visual design.
• Accessibility testing.
• Website development.
• Content migration.
• Search engine optimisation.
• Analytics and reporting.
• Hosting, maintenance and ongoing support.

Distinguish between essential requirements and areas where you are open to recommendations. This allows agencies to challenge assumptions and propose better solutions.

If you are requiring the agency to help with content migration and population, indicating the volume of work to be completed is important, as well as how it is currently stored and will be provided. If you need assistance with copy editing or writing, or SEO copy services, be sure to include this detail in the brief.

Provide any relevant information about your current website, hosting, content management system, integrations and third-party platforms.

This could include your CRM, donation platform, events system, member database, email marketing software, payment provider or single sign-on requirements. One of the biggest determinants on cost is the number of integrations and how they integrate, so please include suitable detail on this.

Unless your organisation has a firm technical requirement, avoid choosing the platform before speaking to potential partners. The most suitable technology should follow from your users’ needs, internal capabilities and long-term plans.

Content is one of the most common causes of website delays.

Explain approximately how much content you have, who will review it and whether you expect the agency to help with auditing, rewriting, migration or governance.

A new design will not resolve unclear, duplicated or outdated content. Build enough time and budget into the project to deal with it properly.

Providing a budget helps agencies recommend an approach that is proportionate and deliverable.

Without one, suppliers may develop proposals based on completely different assumptions, making them difficult to compare. Some may underestimate the work to appear competitive, while others may propose a much more extensive project than you can afford.

A budget range is sufficient if the final amount has not been confirmed. Explain whether it includes VAT, hosting, ongoing support, licences and other third-party costs.

Include the intended appointment date, project start date and desired launch period. Highlight any fixed deadlines, such as a campaign, strategy launch, funding milestone or annual conference.

Avoid setting a launch date based only on when you would like the website to be ready. Your timetable needs to account for discovery, design, development, content production, testing, approvals and staff availability.

Ask agencies to propose a realistic programme rather than requiring everyone to follow an arbitrary schedule.

Tell suppliers what you want them to submit and how you will evaluate their response.

Assessment criteria might include:

• Understanding of your organisation and objectives.
• Proposed approach and methodology.
• Relevant experience.
• Accessibility and inclusive design expertise.
• Project management and collaboration.
• Technical quality.
• Social value.
• Cost and overall value.

Avoid placing too much emphasis on price alone. The lowest-cost website is rarely the best value if it does not meet users’ needs, is difficult to manage or needs to be replaced prematurely.

Asking several agencies to create free designs before appointment rarely produces meaningful evidence of how they will approach the project.

Without discovery, research or access to your stakeholders, speculative concepts are based largely on guesswork. They also favour larger agencies that can afford to provide unpaid work.

Instead, ask suppliers to explain their process, show relevant case studies and discuss how they would explore an example challenge. A paid creative exercise can be used where genuinely necessary.icult to manage or needs to be replaced prematurely.