Planning Your Website - Preparing Your RFP Doc : Intuitive Designs

Mar

2009

Planning Your Website - Preparing Your RFP Doc

by Naomi Niles

In part one of this series, I outlined the information you need to gather before you contact a web designer. In this article, I will show you how to place that information you gathered into a RFP document.

Many agencies and designers provide RFP worksheets for you to fill out that will later serve as your project RFP (Request for Proposal) document. This document will hopefully give enough information for the web designer to give you a proposal and serve as a base point for discussing your web site. If you don’t have one, you may use our example RFP worksheet (doc format) as your starting point.

Some of the things your RFP document should include are the following:

Basic Information:
1. Your project deadline.
2. Your budget.

Your Business Information:
1. Your organization’s name.
2. Your mission statement.
3. Who your target audience is.
4. Who your competitors are.
5. Other applicable information about your company & industry.

Goals of the Project:
1. What do you expect your web site to do for your business?
2. What will make the project a success?

Design:
1. How you envision your site.
2. Other sites you like.

Technical Information
1. What features your site should have.
2. What CMS (content management system) you are interesting in using (ExpressionEngine, Wordpress, Drupal, etc.).

Content Information:
1. Whether you have the content ready or not for you site and if you need the services of a copywriter.
2. Whether or not you need stock photographs.