Most Website RFPs Are Written Too Early

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The best redesigns start months before the RFP

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When a government agency or higher ed institution decides it’s time for a website redesign, the first instinct is almost always the same: write the RFP, send it out, see what comes back.

The instinct is understandable. The procurement process is what people know, and starting it feels like progress. But in 20+ years of responding to these RFPs, I can tell you the projects that go well are almost never the ones that moved fastest to the vendor conversation.

They’re the ones where the team did the harder, quieter work first — inside their own organization, before any vendor was in the picture.

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An RFP can solicit proposals. It cannot tell you what you actually need.

A web team knows the current site is a problem — editors can’t update content without IT, accessibility hasn’t been touched in years, leadership keeps asking about AI-powered search and the answer is always “not with this system.” So the team writes an RFP describing the pain and asking vendors to fix it.

What they don’t know is what the fix should cost, what scope is realistic, or what to ask for. And the RFP doesn’t help them figure any of that out. It just sends the question to 10+ agencies and waits for answers that will range anywhere from $20,000 to $400k.

That spread isn’t a typo. It’s an honest description of where bids land, depending on platform, scope, and how the agency interprets the request. You could average the bids and call that your budget, but averaging ten guesses doesn’t get you to the right number — it just gets you to the middle of ten guesses. Until you know what your project actually needs, more proposals won’t tell you. They’ll just give you more opinions.

The Budget Section Is Where Most RFPs Quietly Sabotage Themselves

The most common piece of bad RFP advice in this sector is “don’t share your budget — see what vendors propose.” It’s everywhere, and it doesn’t work.

A vendor cannot tell you how to approach a project without knowing what there is to work with. A redesign built for $100,000 looks nothing like a redesign built for $350,000 — different platform decisions, different scope, different team. Asking ten agencies to guess what you can afford produces ten incomparable proposals and no useful signal about which one is right for you.

The reasoning behind budget secrecy is that vendors will “pad to the number.” Some might. But a vendor who pads when given a number is a vendor who would have padded anyway, and you’d rather find that out in the proposal than after the contract is signed. Share the budget. The proposals you get back will be sharper, more directly comparable, and a better read on which firms actually understand the problem.

Before you contact any vendor — before the RFP exists in draft form — there’s real work to do inside your own organization. None of it is glamorous. All of it pays off.

1. Name the Team & Lead

Who’s running this project internally? Who are the decision-makers, and who are the department leads and content owners whose input shapes the scope?

Get that group named and aligned before anything else. RFPs without a clear owner are easy to spot — the scope contradicts itself, priorities shift between sections, and no one can answer questions during the bid period. The best vendors learn to recognize them and pass.

2. Document Your Pain Points Honestly

What’s blocking marketing and communications from doing their jobs? What’s IT dealing with on the security and maintenance side? Those are two different lists, and they often surface different requirements. If you only capture one, you’ll write an RFP that solves half the problem.

3. Know Your Own Numbers

Top pages, traffic patterns, where visitors come from, where they drop off. This comes up in every discovery conversation I’ve ever had. Teams that can’t speak to their own analytics signal something unintentional: that the current site is run on assumption rather than evidence. Don’t be that team.

4. Have The Goals Conversation

What does the redesigned site need to accomplish? Not in general terms — specifically. Which audiences are you trying to reach differently? Which integrations matter? What does success look like a year after launch?

If leadership isn’t aligned on the answers before vendors are in the room, you’ll spend the procurement process re-litigating those questions in front of strangers. That’s expensive, slow, and embarrassing. Sort it out internally first

Even teams that do all four of the above sometimes land in the same place: they know what’s wrong, they know what they want, but they still don’t know what to ask for or what it should cost. That’s not failure. It’s a reasonable place to be on a project most organizations only do once a decade.

A path that works well in that situation is a strategic discovery engagement before the full redesign.

The idea is straightforward: hire a partner for a small, bounded scope of work — typically $10,000 to $20,000 — to audit your current site, understand your goals and constraints, and help you develop a realistic scope, timeline, and budget for the redesign that follows.

We’ve done this with a number of clients, and it almost always makes the larger project go better. What you get at the end is a document you can use: a brief covering where the current site falls short, what a redesign would need to address, and a realistic range for what it should cost. Something to bring to leadership as a concrete recommendation, and a foundation for an RFP that reflects your actual situation instead of your best guess at it.

Committing several hundred thousand dollars to an agency you’ve never worked with is a significant risk. A discovery engagement is a much smaller commitment that lets both sides see how they work together before the larger project begins. If it works, you go into the full redesign with a head start. If it doesn’t, you’ve learned that at a fraction of the cost.

The agencies and institutions that fare best in redesign projects show up prepared. They’ve done the internal work, they know their site, and they understand what they need from a new one well enough to say it clearly. The RFP isn’t the start of the project. It’s the result of work you’ve already done.

If you’re at that point and want to talk through what a discovery engagement might look like for your organization, we’d be glad to start that conversation.

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