The Adido Digital Blog

We get a lot projects coming to us here at Adido. Having been working with partner agencies and businesses across the South of England for over six years, we get to see all sorts of possible projects before they are built. Some of them see the light of a monitor, some of them don't.

One of the things that we are still struggle with is the lack of understanding shown by companies before they go to tender. We were made aware of a few tenders for website redesigns in the last few weeks which made us scratch our heads. Below shows a small part of the briefs we received;

• "website needs to be dynamic and utilize features such as search engines, web directories"
• "comprehensive visitor count facility that enables collection of data relating to hits for all pages"
• "knowledge of HTML and other design programming languages (such as JavaScript, ColdFusion, Dynamic HTML, ASP, etc.)"
• "critical that the website is written in line with our branded image" 

We appreciate that those who have no idea about websites, digital marketing or search engine optimisation will find it hard to explain to those in the know what they want from their website. Whenever you try and enter a new industry or explain to people what you need/want without really knowing everything that you should do, things are often very hard.

The issue that businesses that are looking to improve their websites and the results they get from them face when trying to find their potential digital agency is showing up their distinct lack of knowledge. By publishing a brief which is either very hard to understand or makes reference to practices which are years behind the time will only do bad things. From an agency perspective, the following is most likely to occur;

• If a brief is really bad, the agency simply will not have the time to get their head around what is needed for the client. This will mean that tenders are rushed or not submitted at all.
• If the agency doesn't understand what is needed, then the tender will have to account for all of the unknowns available. This could increase the quoted cost and timescales dramatically. 
• If all agencies are forced to give high quotes, it could lead to the project not happening at all or a lesser alternative being selected on price. This could then up costing the client twice as much in the long run as not all issues would be looked at or resulting in missed opportunities which stunt the growth of the business.
  

Our main concern, like any other good web design agency, is being able to quote on what is actually needed rather than what might be perceived to be needed. If a potential client is unsure of what should be asked for when putting a website or digital marketing campaign out to tender, then there are many places to go to get helpful advice.

We've published our own website requirements document and have sent it out to hundreds of users in the last few years to help them with their website planning & build. There are dozens of other websites which can give good introductions on how to brief a web agency, including Business Link, Headscape and Vidoni to name but a few. You can always speaking to any good web design agency (ahem :) who will be more than willing to come and sit with you for an hour to understand more about what you are trying to achieve and help you put a more comprehensive brief together.