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How to Evaluate Site Redesign Proposals

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Spot which agency best understood your goals

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You’ve done the internal work. You’ve formed a web team, documented the pain points, reviewed your analytics, and written an RFP that actually reflects your situation. Now you have a stack of proposals from agencies who want the project.

The problem is that they don’t look anything alike.

Some are forty-page documents with detailed project plans and timeline breakdowns. Others are six pages with a price and a list of services. Some are priced at $30–40k. Others are double or triple that. One quotes $280,000.

The confusion is normal. Proposals for complex government or higher ed web projects are notoriously hard to compare, because agencies make different assumptions about scope — and most of them don’t tell you what those assumptions are.

Your job is to figure out which agency actually understood your project.

Start with what they understood, not what they proposed

Before you look at cost or timeline, read each proposal for comprehension. Does the agency show that they understood what you sent them?

A proposal that reflects your actual situation will reference specifics from your RFP: your platform (CMS), content scale, integration requirements, internal team structure, and pain points.

A proposal that mentions none of that is a generic document that could have gone to anyone. And that tells you something about how the agency would work with you.

The agencies that listened closely enough to reflect your situation back, in their own words, are the ones worth considering. The ones who sent a boilerplate document with your organization’s name pasted at the top probably aren’t.

Understand what’s actually in scope

The biggest source of proposal confusion is undisclosed assumptions. A $50,000 proposal and a $280,000 proposal for what looks like the same project are almost always scoped differently. The lower number usually assumes — or ignores — something the higher number accounts for explicitly. Here are three areas where the scope tends to diverge between redesign proposals.

1. Strategy and analysis

This is one of the biggest variables in any redesign. Some proposals jump straight into design and a rebuild. Others start with a careful, deliberate stage for planning and discovery. The difference can be $20–50k or more on a large site. What are they doing to understand your audience, your goals and outcomes, the user experience, and your existing content? Is this a research-and outcome-based project, or are they going off “vibes”?

2. QA and testing

How do they talk about their build process and quality assurance? Do they carefully plan the new build and migration, or gloss over it? Are they following best practices — local builds, version control, staging environments, automated testing? How is the work tested for accessibility, performance, security, and browser compatibility? The best agencies operate like a well-run machine. The less professional ones do everything on the fly and hope for the best.

3. Best practices and sustainable builds

Two agencies might launch the same site at wildly different costs, and to the average viewer the results look identical in a browser. 

But one is held together with chewing gum and duct tape. The other is built on a strong foundation, designed to last and grow. For non-technical people, the difference is hard to spot. 

The best agencies don’t rely on shortcuts and cheap workarounds. They’re thinking about how your site stays accessible and secure, and how it grows over the long term. They take the time to follow best practices and build sustainably.

If your website is a critical tool that serves thousands of users a year, you can’t afford a cheap build. You need something solid and made to last. Value the process and approach as much as the bottom line. Long-term, you’ll be glad you did.

Look for evidence of relevant sector experience

Government and higher education web projects have specific requirements that commercial web work doesn’t.

Ask for case studies from agencies or institutions specifically. Not just “public sector” or “enterprise” work. Those categories are broad enough to mean almost anything. You want to see projects at organizations that operate the way yours does, with the constraints yours has. 

References matter too. A call with the web director at a state agency or a university that went through this process with the agency you’re evaluating will tell you more than anything else in the review.

Evaluate the process, not just the deliverables

A proposal should describe not just what an agency will produce, but how they’ll work with you. Look for specifics: how discovery is structured, how decisions get made, how feedback is incorporated, how the project stays on scope and schedule when things come up.

Vague process descriptions like “we’ll work collaboratively with your team” are less useful than specific ones: “we hold a two-day discovery workshop with key stakeholders, followed by a written brief that both parties sign off on before design begins.”

The first is true of everyone and distinguishes nothing. The second tells you what to expect.

Post-launch support is worth examining carefully too. A redesign doesn’t end at launch. It ends when your team knows how to use the new system, when the site is stable, and when there’s a clear structure for ongoing maintenance and improvements. Ask each agency to talk about what they provide, and if it’s a long-running, successful program.

Evaluating price

Price matters. But it’s most useful as a factor after you’ve done the work above.

Once you understand what’s actually in scope for each proposal, the price comparisons become more meaningful. An agency quoting $280,000 with content strategy, accessibility compliance, strong QA/testing and a 12-month support period is not necessarily more expensive than one quoting $100,000 without those things.

The lowest bid is rarely the best value, but the highest bid isn’t always the most thorough. What you’re looking for is an agency whose scope reflects your actual project and whose price is explainable by what’s in it.

The last step of evaluating a proposal

After you’ve reviewed the proposals, narrowed the field, and asked your questions, the most useful thing you can do before deciding is get on a call with the finalists. Not to be sold to — to evaluate the relationship. You’re looking for the right fit, and that goes both ways. We come to the conversation with that same goal.

Once you begin, you’ll be working closely together for months, if not years. The quality of that working relationship will matter as much as the technical proposal. Pay attention to how potential partners answer the hard questions, how they handle uncertainty, and whether they’re trying to understand your situation or simply close the deal.

We’re glad to talk through what this process looks like from our side, or to answer questions about what a proposal from Electric Citizen would include.

About the Author

About the author

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Dan Moriarty is the co-founder, CEO and chief strategist with Electric Citizen.

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